Digital Saturation – Saturating Photos with the Channel Mixer!
Saturation is a necessary evil in digital photography. If you are shooting RAW there is no way around it. If you want to get the rich saturated images that were possible in the days of slide film then saturation is the only way. I’m not going to turn this into a ‘how much is okay?’ article on editing, this isn’t the place. Rather I would like to share with you my method (and action) for saturating images which in my opinion produces much better results than the Hue/Saturation adjustment.
Saturation should be used to enhance your images whilst hopefully staying true to reality!
What is wrong with the Hue/Saturation adjustment?
If you start moving that saturation slider you will see the colours in your image, unsurprisingly, become more saturated. To me though the effect can often be unpleasant and of course and significant adjustments (which you probably shouldn’t be making) can result in the blocking or posterisation of colour. In essence I find it to be a generally horrendous tool. The only time I use the Hue/Saturation adjustment is to reduce the saturation of my images!
Saturation with the Channel Mixer
The channel mixer is intended more for colour channel adjustments rather than global saturation but nevertheless it does a great job. The saturation that results from the process is much fresher and produces cleaner images is a way that is hard to explain. I am far from a genius when it comes to the inner workings of Photoshop, so I don’t pretend to know why this works, but simply that it does work. I have called this method ‘Digital Saturation’
The Process
- Create a new channel mixer adjustment layer
- On the Red Channel set Red to +150, Green to -25 and Blue to -25
- On the Green Channel set Red to -25, Green to +150 and Blue to -25
- On the Blue Channel set Red to -25, Green to -25 and Blue to +150
- Click ‘okay’ to apply the adjustment
- Modify the opacity to reduce the saturation to a tasteful level
- Paint the layer mask to selectively saturate different areas of the image
The Action
Adjusting each channel individually is a little bit time consuming and so I have made an action that will saturate your image in the click of a button leaving you with the simple job of adjusting the transparency and/or painting on the layer mask. It’s free to download but if you want to help other people find this article then please link to it!
2 Comments
Hi, the links to the actions in either form do not work! I receive the follwing:
404 error message:
Apologies but the page you requested cannot be found
Thanks, fixed now, sorry I didnt get back to you sooner!
3 Trackbacks
[...] Just playing around with some new photoshop techniques tonight, specifically using… Just playing around with some new photoshop techniques tonight, specifically using the channel mixer for saturation which I picked up from +Alex Nail http://www.alexnail.com/blog/tutorials/digital-saturation/ [...]
[...] now time to fix the color loss caused by all the sharpening with two simple steps. I actually use Alex Nail’s digital saturation method at a 10% opacity in the action, but it’s too elaborate to explain here so just check it out [...]
[...] which I tend to end up doing. I always feel I should add some saturation so I have tried this action from Alex Nail who is an awesome photographer, he has some great information on his site, [...]