Hey! In this tutorial, I will show you how to increase the color intensity and adding glow effect to your photo from something like this to this.

First, we’re going to change the colors space to increase the saturation without destroying the overall tone value. So let's go to image, mode, Lab color. This will switch the color space from RGB to Lab. Your channel will now be made up of lightness, Channel A and Channel B, instead of red, green and blue. Unlike RGB, Lab is designed to imitate what people see. It separates that light and dark from the colors where L is the tone in light and dark value. And Channel A represents magenta and green, and Channel B represents the yellow and blue. It allows us to change the color without making any change to the overall tone value.

So go to the bottom of your layer palette and click on the adjustment layer, select curve, on the channel you will see lightness A and B. Select the A first. Drag the right side of the curve and you will see the magenta is intensified in your photo. And the left side adds green, which brings the photo to a richer magenta green hue if you balance both side out. Same for channel B, bring the right in to add yellow, and bring the left in to intensify the blue. And when you balance both sides, you will now get a higher saturation photo with the tone being the same.

Now go to lightness channel. This represents the overall light and dark value, so we can increase the contrast by giving it more S-shaped curve. And now, you can uncheck the preview to see the difference. And when you are done and you're satisfied with the results, click OK. You can play with the opacity of the curve layer to lower the saturation if it’s still too much for you. I'm going to bring it down to about 50. It’s usually easier to make the adjustment a lot more, exaggerate it and play with the opacity. Later on, I find it’s easier that way.

Okay now, we’re going to merge these two layers by selecting both of them, and right click and select merge layers. Now go back to the image mode and change the color space back to RGB color. Drag the background layer to new layer icon to duplicate it. Let's make a flower sharper without touching the background, so to do that, with the duplicate layers still selected, go to filter, sharpen, unsharpen layer to sharpen it. Use 150 for the amount and 7 for the radius.

Click on the mask icon and now, your sharpen layer has mask icon next to it. Everything that’s white will show, but if you paint this mask black wherever it's black, it will become hidden; the photo will become hidden. So click on the mask to select it and make sure there's a black border around it. That’s how you know your mask is selected. And let's paint black around the flower, so that only the flower of this sharpened layer will show up. So to do that, I filled the entire mask with black and painted the white over the flower area instead. So you can see where there the background is all filled with black in the mask icon, so that all the backgrounds are showing the original background and only the area where I painted the white, which is the flower, will show the sharpened version of it. You can go ahead turn down the opacity if you think you sharpened it too much.

Now, let's add some glow effect to the flower to give it a more dreamy quality. I will take a snapshot of what we have so far by going to select all, and copy merge and paste it. It will copy everything you see on your canvas so far instead of just whatever layer that’s active. So let's go to filter, blur and Gaussian blur, use about 10 pixels and let's intensify the white area by going to image, adjust, and level. You can click on the auto button and let Photoshop correct the exposure automatically.

Now, you’ll see it's a lot brighter and let's blur it one more time. For this layer, assign lightened color blending mode and turn down the opacity down to about 49 or whatever you feel that would fit. Now, you'll get a nice glowing blend, go back and play around with the blur and opacity if you want a different feeling.

Now let's adjust the overall color by going to adjustment layer icon and select curve, make sure this curve layer is at the very top of all the other layer. Go through the channel and play around with all the channels until you're satisfied with the result. And that is it, here is what we have before and what we’ve ended up with.

So I hope you enjoyed my tutorial. Please subscribe to my video and visit my website at sanweng.com. Thank you.