How to Accentuate Certain Colors in Photoshop

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Introduction: This tutorial is to help you learn how to bring out a certain color or colors in a photo.  In this photo I chose to bring out the purple color in the flowers so they are more dominant to the scene.  Ok, once you have your picture open in Photoshop:

1. Use the Color Range Selection Option to select the color that you would like to accent (Select>Color Range).  When the Color Range Dialog box opens, use the eyedropper to select the color on your photo, for this photo I selected the purple on the flower circled in red.

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2. When you press OK, the color will be selected.  Then Copy and Paste the Selection onto a new Layer (Edite>Copy).  And then (Edit>Paste).

3. Then, with that new layer selected, create a New Brightness/Contrast Adjustment Layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Brightness/Contrast)  But when the New Layer dialog box appears check the box that says “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask”.

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4. Then the Brightness/Contrast Dialog Box will appear and you can increase the brightness and contrast of the color you selected to your liking.  For my picture, I increased the Brightness to +39 and the Contrast to +44.

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5. If you want to accent more than one color, just repeat steps 1 through 4.

Everybody will probably have different preferences of how much they want to accent a color.  But this technique can be a very powerful but subtle way of attracting attention to a certain color.

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3 responses to “How to Accentuate Certain Colors in Photoshop”

  1. Data says:

    Wonderful. Thank you so much. Short, sweet, concise and very helpful.

  2. Chris Flees says:

    Short, sweet, and right to the point without a bunch of “fluff”. Excellent tutorial.

  3. Lwazi says:

    short and specific. I like that

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