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While you'll more often be using Photoshop or another image editing application to make photos more realistic by reducing noise, sharpening or color correcting, sometimes a dramatic, obviously unrealistic effect is what's required. In this tutorial I'll show you one way of making images more vivd. Begin by opening an image. I used the one at left.
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Duplicate the current layer (Ctrl+J) and change the blending mode to Soft Light.
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Change the Image Mode to Lab Color (Image > Mode > Lab Color).
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A warning will appear asking if you would like to flatten the layers or not. Select Don't Flatten.
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In the Channels palette (Window > Channels), select the Chroma a channel (Ctrl+2) and apply an Auto Levels (Shift+Ctrl+L). Select the Chroma b channel (Ctrl+3) and apply the Auto Levels again.
Note that this effect does alter the color by using more lumious colors. In this step, instead of applying an Auto Levels to the channels you can try using the Brightness/Contrast tool (Image Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast) to increase the contrast by about 50 to both of the channels.
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Select back the Lab Color mode (Ctrl+~).
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Change the Image Mode back to RGB (Image > Mode > RGB Color).
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A warning will appear asking if you would like to flatten the layers or not. Select Don't Flatten.
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Apply a small Gaussian Blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) to the current layer.
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To adjust the color tone, use the Hue/Saturation tool (Ctrl+U) to change the Hue.
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At left is the final image.
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