There are a lot of adjectives to describe what may be lacking from making an image "POP", but there are only four alterations that can be applied to pixels of a digital file to make the image more to your liking.
Density
The entire image gets either lighter or darker. It's a linear change meaning the shadows, midtones and highlights equally get lighter with less density or darker with more density added.
Color Balance
In a properly color balanced image, gray tones will display neutral. Or, you can shift the balance away from neutral to any color on the color wheel. In the sample above the top image is cooler and the bottom image is warmer.
Saturation
Adding saturation is taking color and driving it to it's purest color. In this image, the flowers and skin tone become a stronger or purer red. Or, taking away saturation, the flowers and skin tone become grayer. Some confuse an overly saturated file with an incorrect color balance. See image above, the bottom image displays higher saturation showing an orange skin color. To correct properly, lower the saturation instead of trying to color balance the image.
Contrast
Lowering the contrast will make the shadow and highlight areas lighter. Adding contrast simply takes the highlight tones lighter and the shadows darker. Adding contrast may take the shadow and highlight detail beyond the clipping points and effectively losing detail in these tones. See the loss of shadow and highlight detail in the bottom image above. Here's a tip, if you are correcting contrast in an adjustment layer in Adobe® Photoshop® , change the blending mode to Luminosity to prevent your image from changing saturation levels.
So, regardless of the adjectives you may use to describe what you'd like to change to a file, choose one of the four options above, learn their attributes and differences. You'll be better able to analyze your images and make those changes judiciously.
posted @ Thursday, May 20, 2010 12:05 AM