This is the original image.

If you can make a terrific foundation, then you can be free to create. This is especially true regarding color. Great color allows you to make better black and whites and utilize all kinds of creative apps. Let me show you how Perfectly Clear’s excellent tools can help you make a sure color foundation to build your photofinishing on.

Preset: Landscapes

Start by clicking on the Landscapes preset button at the top of the window. This activates the excellent tone and color settings in Perfectly Clear and leaves all the stuff for portraits deactivated. Use the Exposure and Depth sliders together to get the tones in your picture looking great — always use these two together.

Here is the Landscape preset without any adjustments. It’s a little too contrasty for me, but it’s a great starting point.

Color tab

In the color tab are several terrific adjustments, and my settings for them in this image are shown here. Begin by disabling all of them so that you can see what they do one by one without seeing the effects of the others. Start with Color Vibrancy, but be gentle. I rarely need to set this above 10, and in this case, I ended up at 6. It makes the cooler colors more vibrant, but it also adds contrast. The higher settings are for pictures with very little contrast.

Fidelity

Fidelity is an incredible tool. Because our cameras have a difficult time recording purple well, Fidelity is intended to bring back the true tones in purples. However, it also does marvelous things for green and blue tones. In this picture, it affects the blue in the sky, but if your photo has greens then you’ll want to try it out, too. Try the Standard setting unless you need a lot more contrast added.

Sky Enhance and Foliage Enhance

Sky Enhance and Foliage Enhance are also where Perfectly Clear shines. Sky Enhance identifies the blues in your picture and enhances them. It adds a lot of punch to the skies without leaving halos around clouds and without any brushing from you. You can choose different settings, but you’ll probably use Blue Sky Royal for normal skies.

Similarly, Foliage Enhance identifies all the greens and the reds and allows you to enhance them with more punch and a different hue. There’s not much greenery in this photo, but you may notice some small green patches at the bottom that look much more vibrant with Tropical Forest applied heavily. The second slider in Foliage Enhance affects the red hues in your picture and it’s my favorite of the three. The options will help bring out the reds — it’s amazing in a forest scene, and in the desert like this, it gives a lot more color depth to an otherwise monotone image.

Simple but powerful

These tools can give you a powerful foundation from which to build the rest of your finishing. This picture looks terrific, now, and with a crop and gentle vignette, it’s ready to share. But there are many more options open. It’s now ready for more finishing in Perfectly Clear (check out the Looks tab) or in other apps, like Luminar. It’s a million times better than it was. Even though the exposure and color settings were correct in the camera, it was bland and boring. Now it’s ready to share.

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