before making your school colors look a whole bunch brighter · step 4: click the saturation slider...
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Photoshop for Yearbook Questions? e-mail: [email protected]
Making your school colors look a whole bunch brighter
This question popped into my inbox about a week ago:
“We took some pics at a softball game, and the green in our uniforms came out looking really dark. If we lighten up the entire photo it makes everything look way too bright. Is there an easy way to just lighten the color of our jerseys?”
Why yes, there is! And it’s really easy. We are just going to use an adjustment layer. After we are done, just those jerseys are going to look a lot closer to their school green than the muddy green they are now.
Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Open the photo in Photoshop (I know this school, and those jerseys are way too dark).
Step 2: From the bottom of the Layers panel, click the Adjustment Layer icon. It looks like a black and white circle split diagonally (Figure A).
Step 3: Choose Hue/Saturation. The Hue/Saturation Properties will open. Since we are making the uniforms more green, find the spot that says Master, click it and choose green (Figure B).
Step 4: Click the Saturation slider and slide it to the right until the uni-forms are the green that you want.
Step 5: It is possible that some parts of the photo are now too green. In this case, the girl on the left has green hair so we need to fix that. To do that, go back to the Layers panel and click the mask you created on the background layer. (Figure C)
Step 6: Type B to select your brush tool and, with a soft-edged brush painting with black (on the mask), paint out all the areas you don’t want to be too green. You can use a really big brush and paint out pretty much everything except the jerseys. The trees can remain as they were, or you can leave them with the new green.
Step 7: Save the file and upload your brightened uniforms.
I do want to add that this will work just as well and as easily with any of the base colors in the Hue/Saturation properties list. This includes red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. And you can combine two of them if you need to. For instance, to pump up orange jerseys, boost red and yellow. And the best part about Adjustment layers is that, if you save a copy of the file as a Photoshop Document, you can come back and change your fix in the Hue/Saturation properties. g
Before
A
B
C
After
Cool stuff