Colour Popping

Although colour popping has been a bit overdone over the last few years, it’s still a fun way to post process your photo’s. It won’t work on every photo you take but, if you choose the right image it can be effective. My own idea of what makes a good image is, where there’s one prominent colour and usually a background that has little vibrancy or saturation. The above photo of the phone box was ideal, we have the red of the frame and a background that needed toning down, to not add a distraction to the focal point. So, how’s it done, using Lightroom I’ll give you an overview on the process.

First, we need a candidate photo, I’ve picked this one of a road crossing point, nice bright yellow and a subdued misty background. The red of the tarmac adds nothing to the photo so that needs to go, and any other colours bar the yellow globe may as well go with it.

Once we have it loaded into Lightroom, the first thing we’re going to do is use the HSL panel to de-saturate most of the colours. You’ll see a lot of options in the panel but we only need to use HSL and Saturation. Now we need to start removing the colour so we’ll drop the sliders to the left except for the yellow and the orange because the globe is made up of both these colours. As you can see dropping the sliders has removed a lot of the colour and left the globe prominent within the photo, I’ve seen photos uploaded at this stage and it’s a shame that the next step isn’t taken to tidy them up.

Although the HSL panel has taken a lot of the colour out, there’s still some residual colour left behind. You can see the yellow sticker on the post and the tarmac is still slightly red. The yellow is easy to understand, we didn’t remove the colour but, there is some red because it was made up of several different colours including the orange. The next step is to remove these and were going to use the Adjustment Brush tool.

Click on the Adjustment Brush icon and a box opens with lots of sliders to change. We’re only going to need one, the Saturation slider and we need to drop this left to -100, now we need to set our brush up. Further down the panel you’ll see Size, Feather and Flow plus letters A and B and Erase. The brush Size we’ll set as we go, Feather is set to 40 and Flow to 100, set these on the A letter (A and B are just two different brushes you can set and switch between quickly) set the Erase brush the same, if you make a mistake it’s just a quick click and brush to remove it. You’ll also see a slider called Density set this to 100 and a box with Auto Mask next to it, leave this unchecked.

It’s just a case now of brushing over the photo to remove any colours left we don’t want, I usually brush over the whole space and around the colour I want left to make sure everything is de-saturated and nothing is missed. If you want to see where you’ve painted press “O” on the keyboard to bring up the Mask Overlay which will show in green or red depending on the setting. You could miss the HSL step out and just use the brush but, I find that using both steps make for a quicker process, for example, if you’re leaving a red in and the background is blue you could use the de-saturate brush around it but, it can be fiddley, better to use HSL and give yourself a head start. At this point the photo is nearly finished, just some basic exposure, black point etc adjustments to make and then export to a JPEG.