Today, you'll learn how to match color saturation in Photoshop to create more realistic-looking images.
If you prefer video tutorials, check out the complete Photo Manipulation for Beginners course from the Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel, and if you want to know more about color, check out this great tutorial on Color Theory for Beginners.
You'll find all the Photoshop resources you need for this tutorial at Envato, as well as tutorials on topics like how to find and prepare images for photo manipulation, how to extract images for photo manipulation, how to create a Photoshop composite, how to match color in photo manipulation, and how to match contrast in photo manipulation.
How to match saturation with selective color in Photoshop
Color saturation in Photoshop is a subtle setting, but an important one. In this image, for example, the colour of the strawberries looks almost radioactive, and the bananas should be much paler.
Step 1
To remedy these issues, create a saturation check layer, which is a Selective Color adjustment layer right at the top of the layer stack.
Step 2
Now, go through all of the color channels and bring the blacks down to -100. Then bring the blacks of the white, gray, and black channels to 100. This is going to make your image look crazy!
What you're seeing is the saturation of your different elements. The more saturated an object, the brighter it looks. So the strawberries in this image, unsurprisingly, are the brightest and thus the most saturated thing on the canvas.
Step 3
Create and clip a Vibrance adjustment layer into our fruit group, and bring down the saturation so that the fruit is no longer radioactive.
Step 4
The bigger splash of milk at the back of the image is also brighter than the others, so add a Vibrance adjustment to all of the milk splashes and start bringing them in line with each other.
Step 5
Both the sky and the grass seem quite oversaturated, so they also need to be toned down.
Before
After
Discover more Photoshop resources and tutorials
In this tutorial, we covered how to match color saturation in Photoshop. To learn more about Color Psychology and Colour Photo Effects With Photoshop Actions or to read tutorials on Photoshop techniques like photo manipulation in Photoshop, head over to Envato Tuts+ and the Envato blog. And for premium digital resources to cover all your creative needs, be sure to visit Envato.
Here are some great resources to get you started:
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