04 Updated colour selection
Now, if you check back to the Hue/Saturation panel, you’ll see the menu option has changed to ‘Yellows 2’. Elements has decided the colour selection is closer to yellows than greens and has created a duplicate ‘Yellows’ entry – though the colour selection is tighter than the generic ‘Yellows’ option already on the menu.
05 Changing the colours
With the colour range selected, you can now set about modifying its appearance, so here’s a quick guide to the settings on the Hue/Saturation panel:
1) Hue: Pushing this slider to the right has made the grass much cooler and ‘greener, but the rest of the colours in the picture, such as the flowers, aren’t changed.
2) Saturation: You can push this much higher than you would normally because you’re only modifying a particular colour range, not the whole picture – big saturation adjustments can still look natural.
3) Lightness: Reducing the Lightness will make your selected colours darker, but they will also lose saturation, so to make colours deeper and more intense you usually have to do both together – reduce the Lightness and increase the Saturation at the same time.
4) Colour range: These bars show the colour range you’re modifying. The inner bars show the colour range that’s going to be changed, while the outer bars are equivalent to a ‘feather’ setting – it’s a way of blending the changed colours more smoothly with the rest so that there are no sudden colour transitions. You can actually drag the gap between the inner markers to move the colour range selection along the spectrum, or drag the inner/outer markers individually.
06 The finished picture
This is more like it. My wildflower meadow now has a rich, ‘Velvia-green’ backdrop instead of the rather dull yellow-green colour of the original. The picture now has much more depth and intensity, and I didn’t have to go juggling levels and curves to get it.
See also
More Photoshop Elements tutorials
