09 Selecting colour channels
I’ve also been working on the combined brightness values of the separate red, green and blue colour channels that make up the full-colour photo. But I can use the pop-up Channel menu to select them individually.
For example, I want to warm up the colours in this picture a little, so I’m going to adjust the red channel, dragging the middle slider to the left to give the picture a slight red tinge.
10 Warming up the colours
To get a realistic-looking ‘warm’ look for outdoor shots, you need to increase the yellow as well as the red. There is no yellow channel, but I can adjust its complementary colour, blue. If I edit the blue channel but push the middle slider to the right this time, this has the effect of weakening the blue channel and, as a result, strengthening its complementary colour, yellow.
11 Boosting the saturation
I can’t resist adding a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to finish this picture off with a saturation boost. It was nearly there with a levels adjustment alone, but it just needed a little more colour…
12 The finished picture
There’s probably a good deal more I could do to this picture to make it better, but the point is that the Levels adjustment was the vital first step. It showed what the faults were with the original picture, and provided all the tools needed to maximise the tonal range and tweak the colour rendition, ready for any further work I might want to do on it.
