Bringing Out Color

Sometimes things pop out at me as I'm taking a stroll. Often a bold color will hit me. Unfortunately my photos rarely convey the pop the way I remember it. This is where a little post-processing comes in handy. If you have Lightroom, it's very easy to make a color pop. Go to the Develop module and scroll down to the Color panel. You can see a row of color pips (little boxes) of different colors. By selecting a pip, you can adjust its hue, saturation, and/or luminance. My case was simple: I just wanted to bump up the yellows, so I selected the yellow pip and increased the saturation. Other photo editing tools like Photoshop will have different ways to accomplish this and may offer more granularity (you can choose more colors than the eight offered by Lightroom), but I hope you get the general idea. If I got the facts wrong please let me know in the comments section! Here's the original photograph: Besides bumping up the yellow, I also increased the exposure, and cropped the photo a little bit. Next time you need a little extra excitement in your photos, give this a try!