What I like about Photoshop Elements is firstly that it’s a fraction of the price of Photoshop (and available as a ‘perpetual licence’) and secondly that it’s quite capable of carrying out almost all the image adjustments I want to do. This is one of my favourite techniques for enhancing colours and I use it the same way in both programs.
It’s a common problem with landscapes – we ‘see’ rich, vibrant greens, but what the camera sees has a duller, yellowish tone. The camera is actually being quite accurate, it’s just showing us colours as they are, not how we want them to be! My start shot (below) is a good example.
So if you hanker after pre-digital colours – and Fuji Velvia’s rendition of greens comes to mind – here’s a way to get them back.
01 Create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.
You can do this by clicking the adjustments layer button at the top of the Layers palette and choosing the layer type from the drop-down menu.
02 Select the ‘Greens’
Normally, you make changes to the hue and saturation values globally, but there’s a great feature that’s easily overlooked – using the drop-down Channel menu, you can select specific colour ranges to adjust. Here, we want to modify the ‘Greens’.
03 More accurate selections
This is fine if the colours you want to modify really are green, but in this case they’re more likely to have a yellowish tinge. The way to make the colour selection more accurate is to click the eyedropper tool and then click in a suitable area of the image. (I’ve circled the area of the picture I clicked on.)