Show your colours

James Paterson uses a host of tonal tricks in Adobe Camera Raw to boost dull colours and enhance fine details in photographs

- James Paterson

How often do you open up a freshly captured photo with great anticipation, only to be lightly underwhelmed by the image on-screen? Colours can look dull, highlights washed out, or shadows too deep. However, it’s easy enough to enhance these details, add punch and create an image that looks more like the actual scene, as you remembered it when you took the photo. Take our bluebell portrait here. Initially the colours look rather disappointing and nothing like the vibrant blues we experienced during the shoot. But with a few simple tricks it’s possible to come up with something much more pleasing to the eye.

Camera Raw and Lightroom offer all the tools you need to carry out these enhancements. But while the interface is intuitive and simple, the tools aren’t all immediately obvious. So in this tutorial we’ll explain how to make a series of powerful tonal adjustments that you can use to boost any image – whether it be one that you’ve just captured, or a shot with uncapped potential that’s languishing in your image library. We’ll begin with simple image-wide tweaks, using the basic tonal sliders, then progress to more advanced local adjustments while employing a range of Camera Raw tricks, from the powerful range masking command to the subtle importance of vignettes.

We’ve used Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin to edit our image here, but you’ll find near-identical tools in Lightroom’s Develop Module, if you prefer. The skills here can be used to coax all kinds of images into life.

STEP BY STEP BOOST A BLUEBELL PORTRAIT