Photo editing experts: Colour correction?

[Ainsley]

So, I'll try to keep a long story short: I did a trade shoot with a photographer early in the summer and love the results. Unfortunately, the photographer doesn't have time to do the retouch work on them, but he has given me permission to edit the photos myself.

I don't mind at all, since it wasn't a paid shoot and I'm a decent retoucher, but I'm having some issues with colour correction. The online album where he posted the proofs boosted the colour in a way that I really like, but I am having trouble recreating that colour balance myself.

If anyone is willing to have a look at the photos and possibly make some suggestions, I would really appreciate the help!

[shimmygoddess]

I can look.....
email me at amara@electricshimmy.com

do you have photoshop? I have a ton of actions that I use to stuff like that....there are alot of free stuff online too...you can try and search for free photoshop actions, color boost or color pop

[KDizzle]

I don't mind looking as well. I will pm you my email address

[roguepen]

Bust out some color with the Channel Mixer in Photoshop.

Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer

Each channel (RGB or CMYK depending on the color space of the photo) has an adjustment for the itself and the other colors. Go through each output channel and bump up the channel color to 110% and the other colors down to 90%. The red output channel settings will be R 110%, G 90%, and B 90%.

You can continue to play with the settings for more saturation. It gives a better color boost than the saturation control.

That's for color boosting. If you are actually correcting the color, that's another can of worms.

[Ainsley]

Go through each output channel and bump up the channel color to 110% and the other colors down to 90%.

I tried this, and it turned the image grayscale. Perhaps we're running different versions of Photoshop? Increasing the channel colour to 110 and leaving the other colours at 0 (or decreasing them into the negative range) did give a colour boost.

Thanks for the suggestion, though! I'm certainly learning lots of new colour editing options through this process.

[roguepen]

My bad. 110, -10, -10.

There are a lot of places to play with the colors besides just the saturation control. The Channel Mixer, Levels, and Curves all can intensify color and most split it up into the different color channels.

[Jenn]

I prefer to play with color through a Selective Color layer then adding on another layer of levels (which really makes the color pop) you can see some of the work I've done at: BananAlbum - the first 6 images are ones I retouched this way. The first 3 images of Raqdoll: SimpleViewer Gallery I also did.

The most effective use of levels (that I've come across) is to drag the outside sliders to the highest black and highest white levels respectively, then use the center slider to find the sweet spot :-)

BTW - I'm working with Photoshop CS2