Photoshop Putorials : Kick It Up This is a simple method to pop color in your image without making it too contrasty. It’s just a...

Photoshop Putorials : Kick It Up

This is a simple method to pop color in your image without making it too contrasty. It’s just a few simple steps, and there is a FREE action at the end of the tutorial! Woot woot! This method uses a luminosity mask which is a topic for another day. But I will show you how to do it!

Run this action after you have done your Clean Edit. We don’t want to boost any blemishes or wonky colors. Okay, here we go!
You should have your image open in Photoshop. We are going to do a luminosity selection, which selects pixels based upon their brightness. In simple terms, we are going to select the lightest parts of the image. Go to your Channels palette and click the icon for ‘Load Channel as Selection’ (In CS5, the shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+2).

We have selected the lightest half of the pixels. But what we want for this method is to select the darkest half of the pixels, so we are going to invert our selection. You can go to Select->Inverse from the menu or use Ctrl+Shift+I as a shortcut. The image now looks like this…

Now that we have the darker half of the pixels selected, we are going to create an adjustment layer. The type of adjustment layer is actually irrelevant in this case, so I will arbitrarily choose a curves layer. Since we have a selection loaded, Photoshop will automatically create a mask based upon our selection. You can see in the mask that darker areas in our photo are showing through the mask (white), while the lighter areas (especially the skin) are covered in black. This is exactly what we want – the darker areas showing through
the mask while the light areas are concealed.

Now we are going to change the blending mode of the layer to Soft Light. You can play around with other blending modes as well – Overlay will give an even more intense contrast. Because of the mask, we are applying the ‘Soft Light’ effect to the darker areas of the photo while leaving the lighter areas relatively the same.

Here is what our image looks like now:

What I like to do next is add a mask to the effect for more control. I make sure the curves layer is selected and press Ctrl+G to create a group. This places the curves layer we created into a folder. I renamed the folder “Kick It Up” and added a mask.

Now I can paint over any areas in my photo where I don’t want the effect. Under her chin became very shadow-y when the effect was applied, so I am going to paint with a black brush at about 30% opacity on the ‘Kick It Up’ layer mask to reduce the contrast there.