Enhancing the colour in photographs, no matter what they may be, is a struggle that most photographers face. Sometimes it’s quite easy. At other times, it’s not. There are a million different methods for enhancing the colour in your images during different parts of your workflow, but this one from Blake Rudis at f64 Academy is rather interesting. Painting colour onto images isn’t a new technique, but the method Black shows in this video uses Photoshop’s Linear Light blending mode to help enhance and enrich the colours in your image using the photograph’s own already existing colour.
The technique is quite simple. Make a new blank layer, set it to Linear Light blend mode with about a 10% opacity. Then, sample the colour you want to enhance, and paint that colour onto the linear light layer above in the sections where you want to enhance it. It’s a great technique for things like landscapes, and allowed you to easily adjust to taste based on opacity.
It also works well for portraits, as Blake shows off later in the video. And if one part of the layer’s effect is a little too strong while the rest is just right, you can always use a mask on that layer with a semi-transparent brush to dial certain parts of it back without affecting the rest.
