Fine Art Photography Blog

Fuji makes slide film in two renowned flavors: Velvia, for intensely colored landscape, and Provia, a more true to life but less break-taking color rendition. Before people debated whether or not Photoshop is cheating, photographers have been choosing their film ( and shutter speed, and aperture ) to suit their tastes. Galen Rowell famously praised Velvia, asking “Who wants to take dull pictures that will last a hundred years?”

Less people these days are using slide film; photography is a digital art now. And while the biggest influence on color saturation is still lighting, we use Photoshop instead of a favorite type of film and darkroom wizardry now. To that end, how does one recreate a digital Velvia?

There are a number of options, actually. Most people use the Hue / Saturation command. Like most approaches in life, this works in moderation, but will only get you so far. Anything beyond a small dose begins to look overly colorized, like a neon sign in Las Vegas or Disney Land. Curves offers the opposite extreme: a little too cumbersome in its power and flexibility, although it makes a good color balancing tool.

Beyond vivacious color, balance is an important part of a stunning visual impression.

Natural Color Saturation

IT professionals say “garbage in, garbage out;” in a photographic context, this means that Photoshop won’t rescue a bad image. Enhancing what’s already there is an easy task, but creating a good photo with a computer is like turning straw into gold.

And so the golden hour is our best friend as photographers. Most natural features - plants, rocks, water - look better in sunlight, especially the soft warm glow before sundown. High altitude is particularly helpful in the evening alpineglow.

Water has a way of bringing out red and green hues. Forest scenes look their best during and just after a rainfall. Here is an example from an earlier post:

Digital Velvia

So how, once we’ve done everything possible behind the lens, do we fine tune the color in a photograph? Like with black and white, the channel mixer comes to the rescue.

Using an adjustment layer, set the red channel to red +110 %, green -5 %, blue -5 %; the green channel to red -5 %, green +110 %, blue -5 %; and finally the blue channel to red -5 %, green -5 %, blue +110 %. This is only a starting point, but generally a good one. If the effect is too powerful for an image, you can either adjust the numbers downward, or set the new layer’s opacity to reign in the change. When it’s not powerful enough, you can increase the numbers, or run the channel mixer again in a new adjustment layer.

Anybody with a high volume workflow is going to find this tedious. This is a job for Photoshop actions; once we understand how to use the channel mixer, a macro can make the adjustments.

Warming and Cooling Filters

So far we’ve looked at editing color saturation: how pure each color is. This makes the reds redder, and the blues bluer; sometimes this is too broad a brush. Photos can often be improved by adjusting their tone, instead of their intensity. Landscapes generally demand warm light, which is why the “golden hour” sunlight is so valuable. Photographers used to put rose colored glass on the end of their lenses, but some images demand the opposite.

Compare the two photos below. The first, Rocky Mountain Sky, needs a reasonably healthy foreground, but the frame is dominated by a wide sky overhead. This looks best in deep, rich shades blue. Below is a more typical landscape - the sky doesn’t cooperate enough very often - from Glacier, Montana. Brilliant reds inspire the boulder splitting the river to life; the moss on the side of the gorge is especially vibrant.

Mimicking the range of options available from different lenses and filters is easy. Again the hue / saturation tool can be used, particularly with the colorize option, to create unnatural color schemes, like a purple or yellow shade. The color balance tool gives more natural results, adding “pop” when it’s needed.

Adjustment Layers

In case you aren’t familiar with them, adjustment layers are extremely popular among heavy Photoshop users. They allow “non-destructive edits,” meaning the changes aren’t applied to the image itself; more like overlaying a rose colored filter on the front of a lens. You can lower the opacity to reduce the effect, and you can use layer masking to paint out areas that seem over the top.

Download the Photoshop Action Set

Color.atn automates the techniques described above. You’ll find six actions wrapped up within the set:

• Velvia - Produces intense colors across the spectrum.
• Warming Filter - Produces a reddish yellow cast.
• Cooling Filter - Produces a bluish cyan cast.
• Curves (Layer) - Launches the curves command as an adjustment layer.
• B/W ChanMix - Produce a black and white image using the channel mixer.
• USM - Sharpens an image and applies the changes to a photo’s luminosity only.

Enjoy! A few of these obviously aren’t related to today’s topic, but I tend to use these together, so they’re bundled together.