PI - Struggling to get colour saturation

[swag72]

I have followed the tutorials a number of times and always seem to struggle on the colour saturation section. What ever I do with my images I am really struggling to get much colour into them at all - I have experimented with all types of wierd and wonderful curves, the colour saturation tool too, I just can't seem to get much colour out. It's there, just won't come!! So, any tips or tricks?

[dlp]

I usually have the opposite problem - putting too much in!

Don't know where you've got to in your tests, but I always start by creating a luminance mask, adjusting up the blacks/whites with histogram and then applying to the image. You can check the mask by turning it on/off and looking at the inverted view too. Now you won't muck up the b/g. I then use curves with the individual RGB channels to bring up an individual colour if needed, then go to saturation to increase/decrease that. If you click in the image in readout mode you'll see where on the curve you need to adjust by adding points, probably constraining the highlight end so you don't blow those out.

I've found the saturation tool itself fairly unusable.

Hope this helps, but sorry if I'm 'teaching granny to suck eggs'.

David

[swag72]

Hi David - Not teaching me to suck eggs at all - Thank you. Will see how it goes. The difficulty is knowing what the end result should look like!!