|
 |
Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom: Brightening Greens with Luminance
By Steve Weinrebe | Wisdom and Inspiration |
Jul 15, 2009
|
|
As
one of the first Photoshop instructors ever to be certified by Adobe,
Steve Weinrebe has trained thousands of students that come to him from
myriad professions for his hands-on style of teaching. Recently, Steve
authored the textbook, Adobe Photoshop & the Art of Photography: A
Comprehensive Introduction (Cengage Delmar-Learning, 2008), so that
college and high school photography students around the world can
benefit from his method of teaching Photoshop. Steve's career as a
professional photographer spans 30 years, and he recently joined the
faculty of the Maine Media Workshops. Steve offers Photoshop training
in Moorestown New Jersey, and his Authorized Adobe Training Center,
Imaging R & R, offers classes in Creative Suite software in
Princeton N.J.
Steve’s latest book, Irreverent Photo Tools for Digital Photographers (Course PTR), will be available in Fall 2009.
Photography © Copyright Steve Weinrebe, Getty Images
www.steveweinrebe.com
www.modestudio.us
Of all the colors in the visible spectrum, the human eye is most sensitive to green. But capturing green as brightly in photographs as it is to the naked eye, especially in foliage, can be difficult. With summer vacation season in full swing, green foliage and grass creep into a lot of photos, and you might find yourself trying to pump up those greens in post production to be brighter in the final image. But that is easier said than done.
Those pesky greens
Brightening green is a typical problem for nature and landscape photographers, as well as for anyone taking pictures containing green leaves and green grass. There are a number of ways to isolate green in an image using Photoshop. Hue/Saturation for example can isolate a correction to the green range on the color wheel, but the Brightness slider in Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation simply adds white or black, and doesn’t have an effect that would help brighten a color without destroying the tones and contrast of the picture. With an RGB image, Curves or Levels can isolate the Green channel, but adding green globally, as when lightening the Green Channel, is generally a very bad idea for photographs. Photoshop’s Color Range feature can also isolate a color to then apply a Curve to, or a Brightness/Contrast adjustment to, but the results are usually inadequate when trying to lift up the tones in green foliage.
That’s where Camera Raw’s, or Lightroom’s, Luminance control excels. Luminance will lighten the color without destroying tones, as if a light were shining on just the greens in your image and you have control of the intensity of the light source.
Adjusting Greens with Luminance
First open a RAW format image, or JPEG, or single layer TIFF, in Camera Raw or Lightroom. Then choose the HSL panel (HSL/Grayscale in Camera Raw), and drag the Green slider to the right. In the horse fantasy image you can easily see the effect of no correction, and a +75 correction to the Greens luminance in the grass.
In the strawberry field image below, the entire image looks brighter just by virtue of adjusting the Luminance slider for just the Greens.
With the following photo of some grapes in my back yard, dragging the Greens luminance slider to the right, to lighten the green in the image, had the added benefit of lifting up the shadows on the arbor because the green grape leaves were reflecting a lot of green color into the shadows.
As with many of my tutorials, I’m trying to make your life easier, not more complex. You may find that for your own particular vision of how you want the green colors to appear in your images that a more convoluted approach to lightening green is to your liking. That’s fine, though I don’t think you’ll be as successful and you certainly won’t find any tool as simple. Anyway, it’s summer, so instead of adding complexity to your post production, use this simple technique and go enjoy some free time to take pictures.
Let us know if you found this article useful, and tell us what kinds of articles you'd like to see in upcoming issues. Send your comments and ideas to the editor.
© Copyright 2010 by PHOTOWORKSHOP.COM
Top of Page
Last Updated: Aug 11th, 2010 - 13:36:44
|
|
|
|
|
Wisdom and Inspiration: Additional Articles
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
