Do you drool over the luscious photos in travel magazines, the ones of vivid destinations that make regular life seem drab in comparison? What is it about those photos that makes them so dramatic? Often the answer is the saturation, or intensity, of the colors. Supersaturated color makes for darned appealing landscape and object photos, regardless of how the real thing may rate on the vividness scale.
There are various ways to adjust the saturation of your photos. Some cameras have features that help control it, but Elements lets you go even further. For example, by increasing or decreasing a photo’s saturation, you can shift the perceived focal point, change the image’s mood, or just make your photo more eye-catching.
By increasing your subject’s saturation and decreasing it in the rest of the photo, you can focus your viewer’s attention, even in a crowded photo. Figure 9-15 shows an example of this technique. (You can download the photo skipper.jpg from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com to try it yourself.)
It’s easy to change saturation. You might want to start with the Raw Converter’s Vibrance slider (remember that you can open other image formats there besides Raw files—see Choosing bit depth: 8 or 16?). If that doesn’t work well, try using either of the more traditional methods: the Hue/Saturation dialog box or the Sponge tool, which are explained in the following sections. For big areas or when you want a lot of control, go with the Hue/Saturation dialog box. If you just want to quickly paint a different saturation level (either more or less saturation) on a small spot in your photo, the Sponge tool is faster.
Tip
Many consumer-grade digital cameras are set to crank the saturation of your JPEG photos into the stratosphere. That’s great if you love all the color, but if you prefer not to live in a Technicolor universe, you can desaturate your photos in Elements to remove some of the excess color.
Hue/Saturation is one of the most popular commands in Elements. If you aren’t satisfied with the results of a simple Levels adjustment, you may want to work on the hue or saturation as the next step toward getting eye-catching color.
Hue simply means the color of your image—whether it’s blue or brown or purple or green. Most people use the saturation adjustments more than the hue controls, but both hue and saturation are controlled by the same dialog box. In Elements, you can use the Hue slider to actually change the color of objects in your photos, but you’ll probably want to adjust saturation far more often than you’ll want to shift an image’s hue.
Figure 9-15. Top: All the yellow flowers in this image are equally bright, including those in the background, so you might miss the butterfly on the front blossom. Bottom: To make the butterfly and its flower stand out from the crowd, desaturate the rest of the image.
When you use Hue/Saturation, it’s a good idea to first make most of your other corrections—like Levels or exposure changes. When you’re ready to use the Hue/Saturation command, just follow these steps:
If you want to adjust only part of your photo, select the area you want to change.
Use whatever Selection tool(s) you prefer. (See Chapter 5 for a refresher on selections.)
Call up the Hue/Saturation dialog box.
Go to Enhance→Adjust Color→Adjust Hue/Saturation, or to Layer→New Adjustment Layer→Hue/Saturation. As always, if you want to make changes that you can easily reverse, use an Adjustment layer instead of working directly on your photo. (If you go the Adjustment layer route, you’ll make your changes in the Adjustments panel rather than a dialog box, but your options are exactly the same.)
Tip
Using an Adjustment layer gives you more flexibility because you can always come back and edit the layer’s mask later on if you change your mind about what you want to include. See Editing a layer mask for more info.
Move the sliders until you like what you see.
To adjust only saturation, ignore the Hue slider. Move the Saturation slider to the right to increase the amount of saturation (more color) or to the left to decrease it. If necessary, move the Lightness slider to the left to make the color darker, or to the right to make it lighter. If you’re using an Adjustment layer, that’s all you have to do. (If you use the dialog box, click OK when you’re satisfied.)
Incidentally, you don’t have to change all the colors in your photo equally; Figure 9-16 explains how to focus on individual color channels.
The Sponge tool gives you another way to adjust saturation. Even though it’s called a sponge, this tool works like any other brush tool in Elements; the process of choosing the size and hardness is the same as choosing them for a brush (see Picking and Using a Basic Brush).
Tip
Although the Sponge tool is handy for working on small areas, all the dragging required gets old when you’re working on a large chunk of your image. For those situations, use Hue/Saturation (Making Colors More Vibrant) instead.
To use the Sponge tool, just drag over the area you want to change. Figure 9-17 shows the kind of work the Sponge does.
Figure 9-17. The Sponge tool was applied to the upper-right part of this wall, increasing the color saturation and making the paint redder. Approach the Sponge tool with caution: It doesn’t take much to degrade in your image, especially if you’ve made lots of other adjustments to it. So if you start to see noise (graininess), undo your sponging and try again at a reduced Flow setting.
You may want to press Ctrl+J/⌘-J to create a duplicate layer before using the Sponge. That way you can throw out the duplicate layer later if you don’t like the changes, or add a layer mask to restrict the area they affect (Layer Masks). Here’s how to use this tool:
Activate the Sponge tool.
Press O (that’s the letter o, not the number zero) or click its icon in the Tools panel, and then choose the Sponge from the pop-out menu. Then choose the brush size and the settings you want in the Options bar.
Drag in the area you want to change.
If you aren’t seeing enough of a difference, increase the Flow setting (explained in a moment) a little. If the effect is too strong, reduce the Flow number.
Tip
If you have a hard time coloring (or decoloring) inside the lines, select the area you want before sponging. That way the tool won’t have any effect outside the selection, so you can be as sloppy as you like.
The Sponge tool’s Options bar has a couple of unique settings:
Mode. Here’s where you choose whether to saturate (add color) or desaturate (remove color).
Flow. This setting governs how intense the effect is; a higher number means more intensity.