The Most Natural Saturation Boost in Photoshop

[Music] and this second bonus feature of palette effects we're going to continue along this whole line of color but instead of looking at color tools we're going to be looking at one of the most natural ways to boost the saturation and contrast in your image using the data in your image okay so it sounds kind of confusing at first but what we're going to do here is I'm going to show you how to do it and then I'm going to show you why it works okay and it's going to be using something called the subtract blend mode of all things the subtract blend mode and the colors already exist in your image the beauty of this is there is no guesswork it tells you exactly what needs more saturation by removing the things that don't work so the first way that we can do this is to actually make a copy of our image so if we're working on our image like this we would just press command or control J but if we had a bunch of work going on I would suggest doing exams so if you had layers let's say we had a curves adjustment layer on here just say boom curves okay what I would suggest you do here is press ctrl shift alt and E and that will make a stamp of all of your work that means that all of this stuff gets in there it's not just a duplicate of your background layer it's actually a stamp of everything that's been done underneath this layer the next thing we need to do is press command or control I and that's going to invert our image and look horrible and does for a reason because what it's doing is taking all of our blacks and turning them white taking all of our greens and turning the magenta taking all of our blues and turning them yellow and taking all of our Reds and turning them cyan so it's inverting everything on the color wheel so it's using the laws of complementary color theory here to reverse all of our colors with its complement on the color wheel that's what invert does so now we need to use the data that we just got from this to boost the saturation and the contrast and our image we're going to do is go to the blend mode and select subtract and it's going to look like junk okay because what's happening here there's an algorithm that's happening what's happening is every single color that is being applied on the invert side of this is subtracting itself from the underlying colors so anything that is a mild green is now going to get a lot of green added to it because we're actually taking away the magenta that is in that color so the trick here is to go into your opacity and drop this down to about 15% or so now we'll turn the flare off turn the flare on if you need more just go ahead and increase it and you'll see that your contrast and your colors are both being increased at the exact same time why is it doing this well the reason why it's doing this because you're actually removing the culprit colors that are holding those colors back from being the color that they want to be what do you mean like okay so here's the deal when I used to be a painter this is what I would do i had my palette right and let's say i had the color blue on my palette and that color blue is really saturated what I would do is I would take it its complement and I would mix it with its complement to subdue the saturation of the color blue which would then take this supersaturated version of the color blue and it would make it less saturated by adding its complement what we're doing with this subtract blend mode instead of adding the complement to it we are subtracting the complement from it so we're basically saying okay greens I know you want to shine that I know you want to be fruitful but as it stands right now there is a little bit too much magenta in you so let's remove that magenta from you now there's another way to do this it's a really simple way to do this if we come in here and we go down here to the invert blend mode this will invert anything that is happening underneath this layer the reason why I preferred to do the invert method as opposed to the stamp or the duplicate is because a stamp or a duplicate is essentially going to be a carbon copy of everything that's done whereas this because it's an invert layer will allow itself to change and modify it based on what colors get added to it so we've got this set to invert next we need to go to subtract and then we need to come over here to opacity and drop this down to about 15 or let's say 25% so we can really see so now if we were to take any of the things that we learned in the first special feature of let's say a hue/saturation adjustment and we were to go into any one of the individual colors as we move and modify this it is going to automatically be fluctuating how much tone and color needs to happen in this image below with this invert layer on top that's why I prefer the invert layer because it actually works while you're working on your photograph so this is actually the most natural way to boost the saturation and the contrast in your image why we boosted in contrast our image exactly for that reason we're subtracting anything that will be holding back those tonal values from being pure forms of black as it stands if you were to go ahead and go into your invert blend mode again and change this back to normal and bring the percentage all the way up again it doesn't look very good that's why we need to drop it bring this into subtract and drop that opacity so we can start applying the colors to our colors now how does this differ from just going into a hue/saturation adjustment layer and just slamming up the saturation all you see here what we're doing we slam up the saturation here is it's not necessarily removing the culprit color from allowing that one color to boost what it's doing is it's just adding a ton of color to the color that already exists and it's not quite working out let's go ahead and look at this in a different example so here is a more of a demonstration image that will probably help you out a little bit so what I've done here is I've created a very low saturation blue green and red right here and over here on the left hand side you see a mild gray a white a black and a dark gray so what we're going to do is we're going to do that trick we're going to make a new adjustment layer it can be an invert adjustment layer we're going to change that blend mode to subtract and watch what happens now look at our colors all of our colors are actually getting the most form of saturation that they can get for the color that they are and the reason why that's happening again is because this blue right here the reason why this blue is so blue if we go into it look at what happens here when we go into this color blue you can see that our red is at 125 our green is at 115 and our blue 2:01 well now if we were to do something like this turn on that blend mode and let's say we just go ahead and go into our brush tool and we press alt or option and click on this color to see what this color is now notice how our blue is now 147 essentially what we've done is we've subtracted all of that red and that green that we're holding that image back so it's going to take a look at that color again 201 blue notice how right here green is 115 and red is 125 its subtracting all that red and green that is holding that blue back from being a potent form of blue same thing is happening with green same thing is happening with red now the interesting thing is what's happening over here notice how white does not change at all and black does not change at all when we do this method our whites and our blacks are our darkest form of black and our lightest form of white being zero in the in the black scale and 255 and the white scale are not losing any information at all but notice how if we turn this layer off we have a light gray swatch here at a dark gray swatch here that dark gray almost turns black that's why the contrast increases in our image the contrast our gray areas our tonal areas are also increasing throughout the subtract process I know this isn't easily remembered here so what we're going to do is I'm going to show you that on the palette effect palette here if you open this up right here in the color section as a saturation boost button by default it's set to subtract 15% but you can change that percentage to whatever percentage you like to get the saturation and contrast boost that you need in your image that you're working on so I know this isn't the easiest thing to wrap your head around and the subtract blend mode you may have never used ever in your life because I know I didn't until I started discovering color theory and how I could use color theory to my benefit but essentially what the subtract blend mode does just so that you're taking notes if you're thinking about this the subtract blend mode reduces the amount of color that is holding a color back from being its highest potency of color so if you have a green that is not very saturated it's going to be removing magenta from that green and applying itself to that and that's why it's a really good idea to keep this layer on top of all of your works as you edit things underneath things can change according to the saturation that you need in your image that's why I consider this the most natural saturation and contrast boost you can ever get in Photoshop [Music] [Music]

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 37,282

Keywords: Saturation Boost, Adobe Photoshop, Blake Rudis, f64 Academy, How To Boost Saturation in Photoshop, Inverted Adjustment Layer, Invert Saturation Boost

Id: _w5SA-XYAE4

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2017