Photoshop How To

This Photoshop tutorial from NBP Retouch Tools discusses a variety of concepts and techniques for the best ways to give photos a necessary saturation boost while retaining a realistic look. There are several ways to get the job done, some more effective than others, and there's a good chance that your everyday method can be improved.

Instructor  Nino Batista is an accomplished photographer and post-processing expert whose tutorials demonstrate "how simple things can be when you have the right tools in your hands." Today's out-of-season image is an eye-catching environmental portrait captured at New Mexico's White Sands National Park—one of his favorite places to shoot.

Batista sets aside the common approach of targeting colors with selections, and he spends eight minutes demonstrating less–familiar techniques that can be easier and equally effective depending upon the specific image at hand.

The photo you see here is a great example because of the extreme saturation differences within the frame, but the techniques you'll learn will work equally well for more conventional scenes. Batista notes that whatever the case, the key to boosting saturation is "where we do it and where we don’t."

Batista's challenging sample shot includes white gypsum sand in the foreground against a dark blue sky. And then there's his model with minimal saturation that needs to be slightly increased without spoiling the suntanned tone of her skin. He first pulls saturation all the way up (something you'd never really do in an edit) just to illustrate the various areas that need work.

He then walks you through a variety of methods for different purposes than enable you to enhance saturation properly without introducing color artifacts in the highlights or shadows of a scene. Bottom line: Whether your subject is an expansive landscape, portrait, macro shot or something else, Batista provide the tools necessary for adjusting saturation to perfection.

After the video concludes be sure to visit the popular NBP Retouch Tools YouTube channel where there are many more instructional videos to be found.

We also recommend watching the earlier tutorial we featured with another image-editing expert who demonstrates how to clean up landscape photographs with a new Photoshop tool that detects and removes unwanted distractions with a single click.