Today’s 30 Days of Aviary Tip: Enhancing Saturation

Enhancing saturation is an easy way to make an average picture look like a professional magazine quality photo using Aviary. You may be thinking “Don’t I just go to the Hue & Saturation tool and turn up the saturation?” And, yes, you could do that, but this tutorial is more about enhancing the saturation of elements you want to stand out, not just boosting all colors in the picture.

Basically, you’ll want to isolate elements onto their own layer and give them the treatment they need to look more like their “platonic ideal”, which will make them “pop” more. For example, we think of teeth as white and cherries as red—so the redder the cherry and the whiter the teeth the “better” the photograph looks.

The first step should be to raise the contrast on the entire picture—this will make each element have a more definite ‘boundary’ and shape to it. Once you’ve done this, copy elements you want to isolate on their own layer. In this example, you’d want to copy the teeth onto their own layer and lower their saturation and then raise their contrast. This will make them “whiter” looking, which, in contrast, will make the cherry look redder.

The next step used in this example was to select the cherry itself. Then it’s saturation and hue was adjusted until it looked bright red. The final step was to select the background and raise it’s saturation to bring out the green. The stark contrast of the color green against the red cherry, and the white teeth biting into the cherry, both make the cherry look ‘redder’ than it would look had you just raised the saturation of the cherry alone, or the entire picture at once.

Basically, you want remember to split up specific ‘objects’ onto their own layer, and adjust their settings individually rather than adjusting the entire image all at once. Use this effect to create striking images without an expensive camera! We’d love to see what you can do.

Tagged: 30 Days of Aviary