In part one of this guide I covered the basics for color balancing. In this guide, I’ll show you more advanced techniques on how to take your color corrected photo and turn it into a gorgeous, glossy photo you might find on the cover of a magazine. This process relies a lot more on artistic interpretation than straight-foward color correction, so an eye for color certainly helps.

While my objective with this post is to achieve a colorful glossy underwater photo, you can use the same techniques to achieve any kind of style or mood you are looking for whether it’s a Film Noir look or a cold wintery day feel to your photo. Here is the original photo next to the color balanced one:

For this step, you’ll need a good grasp of how the colors correspond to one another in the levels/curves palette. Most of you are probably familiar with the terms RGB and CMYK, but not everyone is aware that the two color modes are directly related. Each channel correponds to its opposite color in the other color mode. For instance, red and cyan are opposites as are green/magenta and blue/yellow (black isn’t referenced). See this handy chart:

If you wanted to add cyan you’d drag the red midtone slider to the right in the red channel which would also remove red. In the same way, if you wanted to add red, you’d move the slider to the left which would also remove cyan. This works the same for the other color channels. The same method holds true for highlights and shadows. I’ve illustrated this on some levels palette snapshots:

To start, I’m going to create another levels layer. This picture still has a lot of cyan and green in the image which makes it look washed out. I want to minimize the cyan and green and boost the red to make the coral in the foreground stand out as well as get a deeper richer blue.

On the red channel, I’m going to lower the red highlights to 225, this pulls out some of the cyan and boosts the red. On the green channel I set the green shadows slider to 40 which tones down the green by bringing up the magentas in the shadows. These two adjustments reveal too much blue though, so I’m going to tone that down. In the blue channel I drag the blue midtones slider to 0.75 and drag the highlights slider to 230 to keep any yellow from creeping in. This leaves us with something that looks like this:

Now that we’ve got our basic top level adjustments done, it’s time to do some manual work. I like how the rocks behind the coral are green, the split complement sets off the foreground’s warm colors. Unforunately the last adjustment took a lot of the green out, so now I’m going to manually add that back in.

Create a new levels adjustment layer and in the green channel drag the highlights down to 210. This adds back in the greens on the rocks (and everywhere else). Fill the layer mask with black and with the brush tool and white as your foreground color paint back in the green only on the rocks.

The last adjustment I want to make is to turn the water in the background from a pale cyan to a rich ocean blue. For this I’m going to use a Hue/Saturation Layer. Hue/Saturation lets you control each individual color channel separately without effecting any other channels.

The Hue slider lets you shift one color channel to another, you can reference the color stripe along the bottom for what the shift will do. The saturation slider lets you control the amount of color in the image. Be careful when using the Hue/Saturation Layer because it’s very easy to overdrive or blow out the colors in your image which makes it look speckled or grainy. I recommend you don’t move the hue slider further than +/-10 points, and the saturation slider no more than 20 points when boosting color.

Quick Tip: If you haven’t developed an extremely sensitive eye for color and want to notice subtle colors in your image, you can temporarily drag the Saturation slider to 100 which will boost all of the colors up to their maximum color value. This will let you see exactly what colors are present in your image.

Now, on the Hue/Saturation Layer on the master channel, I’m going to increase the saturation by 10 to bring out more color in the image.

On the Cyan channel (which I selected from the drop down menu in the H/S dialog), I’m going to drag the hue slider to the right by 10 points which moves all the cyan colors into the blue range.

And here is the finished shot:

I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comments.