Picking up where we left off in part-1…
Now lets look at enhancing the color saturation. Of course this could be done with a Hue/Saturation adjustment, but we will do this another way to gain access to the channels of the Lab version of this image. Duplicate the document (Image-> Duplicate…) check the Merged Layers checkbox & rename with Lab…
Convert this duplicate to Lab…
Now we will use a little trick to boost the saturation. First apply a Curves adjustment layer, but don’t make any changes to the curve. Then change the layer blend mode to Overlay…
Having the image in Lab gives us a unique way to achieve hyper color saturation without added tonal contrast – we use advanced blending options…
The result leaves only the extra saturation from the a & b channels…
Right now, its way too saturated, so we will blend out some of the saturation using the Blend If area at the bottom of the Blending Options dialog. Pulling the black and white sliders in to the center of the b channel gradient, has the effect of removing the saturation from blue and yellow colors – split the little triangle sliders by option/alt – dragging them apart. Setting the sliders as shown will bring in just enough extra saturation…
It is way too easy to push the saturation beyond the limits of human vision in Lab so it can be very helpful to use the gamut warning under the View menu while you are adjusting the saturation. Go to the view menu. By default the Proof Setup is at Working CMYK – this is perfect for our our needs so just check to make sure its set there, and then turn on the Gamut Warning by checking it…
Now I’d like to shift the green in the foreground bushes towards a cooler, more Kelly green color. This is easy to do with a targeted Hue/Saturation adjustment layer…
Here I’ve shifted the hue to the right towards green, away from yellow just a bit to liven up the color of the green bushes. You can leave the Gamut Warning on just to make sure you don’t shift the colors into something too extreme, but certainly after you’re done, you can turn it off.
At this point you can flatten the Lab duplicate. Then, very important, hold down the shift key, use the move tool to drag from inside the Lab file over to the Tab for the original RGB file, wait until the window comes forward, and drag down into the window – let go of the Mouse! The color enhanced lab version will convert to RGB and drop onto the layers in perfect registration. If not, try it again – it can take a bit of coordination, but once you get the hang of it its easy.
At this point I usually change the layer blend mode to color, as this leaves open the possibility to change the contrast with the underlying channel mixer or some other adjustment without distorting the color. So, we have the Lab color (even though its now in RGB) sitting on top of the other two layers in color mode…
The next step in the workflow is where it gets very interesting—we are going to blend the “b” channel into the RGB image as a “Overlay” layer—stay tuned for the final installment of the 10-Channel Workflow in part-3
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