FAQ for Photographers: How I Make Colors Pop

My new online friend Ute recently asked me how I get my images to be so colorful… or if I just have all the luck and get only sunny days and colorful backdrops. Hahaha… I wish! The thing about being a wedding photographer is that there are SO many things you just can’t control. Can’t control the weather, can’t control the lighting conditions of the ceremony space, can’t control the location, can’t control the timeline. The only thing you can do is learn how to be prepared for ALL situations. Learn how to use the light you’re given. Learn how to light the spaces you’re given if there IS no light. So I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this here, so that it might possibly be helpful to someone else out there. [Everything I learned about photography, I learned thanks to the generous knowledge and wisdom shared freely on the Internet and in books by other photographers, so I feel that the best way to repay them is to turn around and share what I have learned with people who might be in the same situation I was once in.] I almost entitled this post “How TO Make Colors Pop,” but then I realized that there will always be a million different ways to do things… this is just the way that I do them. So please read with a grain of salt and know that there are no hard and fast rules, only opinions, tips, and tricks.

For me, the first step to a bright, colorful photograph is 100% LIGHT. When I first began dabbling in photography, I was way more concerned about locations, thinking that I would automatically get awesome images if I just went down to the railroad tracks or walked around downtown. Not necessarily so. Sure, it’s great to be able to choose interesting locations, but on a wedding day, you don’t always have that luxury, so you gotta know how to make every location WORK. And the first step to making it work is finding the best lighting scenario. For me, that’s either the early morning or late afternoon, when the sun is lower in the sky and softer on the skin. If it’s cloudy outside, the time of day is less important, because the diffusion of the clouds means you have to worry less about weird under-eye shadows or harsh blown-out highlights in awkward places. If it’s the middle of the day and really bright and sunny… well, that’s a classic photography challenge. :) The safest thing to do would be to take your subject to a shady area for even, soft light. But there are other creative solutions. If you like playing with off-camera lighting, break out your flashes and experiment with underexposing the skies while throwing bright light directly onto your subject. Or you could always look for interesting indoor locations. Remember, not everything has to be outside. Play with light streaming through windows, or bright overhead lighting, or again, break out the flashes.

Once you find your best lighting scenario, it’s important to properly expose your photographs in order to preserve the best color. For me, this means shooting in manual mode and in RAW at all times. Period. I want to have complete control over my settings, because I know I can’t always trust my camera’s meter, especially in tricky lighting situations. Also, I want to have the security of knowing that if, for some reason, I miss the right exposure on a key shot, I can “save” it in post-processing. Now, a lot of photographers just use this as an excuse to shoot willy-nilly without worrying about nailing exposure, because it can always be “fixed.” Well, I think if you have this attitude, you’re creating a heckuva lot of unnecessary work and stress for yourself. It’s a lot more work to “fix” an improperly-exposed image than it is to put the polishing touches on a spot-on exposure. Honestly, this is something that just comes with time and practice. There are a lot of resources out there to learn about the triangle of ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Go do your homework, and just start shooting.

Okay, so now that I’ve gotten good lighting and nailed my exposure, how do I make my colors really pop in post-processing?

I pulled up a few photos from my most recent weddings to illustrate my workflow. FYI, I do all my editing in Bridge and Photoshop. No reason for not using Lightroom, I’ve just never seen a need for it in my process. So all the screenshots you see here will be from a Bridge window.

First up, I want to show you SOOC (straight-out-of-camera) why an under-exposed image is not ideal for getting great color. The image here on the left is of Audry. It’s one of the first shots I took in this series, so I was testing the light and finding the right settings. But I do like the shot and thought I could do a little something with it. Fortunately, since I was shooting RAW and at ISO 100, I had this luxury. All I did here was bump the exposure +2.45 and bump the contrast a wee bit in Bridge. The image on the right is the result. It’s not a bad shot by any means, but still a little dark for my taste.

And here, on the left, is a SOOC image that, to me, reflects a solid exposure. I know it’s a little bright for some people’s tastes, and that’s ok. To each her own! But I know I like my images on the bright side, so for me, it’s perfect. This was also the ideal lighting scenario for me. Because it was late afternoon, the sun was really golden and was shining down behind Audry’s head, creating gorgeous rim light around her head and a little bit of flare (which I LOVE). But the best part is that behind ME (in front of Audry), was a large light stone wall which was bouncing the sunlight right back onto Audry’s face, creating nice, even, bright light. AND, because I positioned Audry in a “pocket” of direct sunlight, I was able to keep a nice, solid background of trees behind her instead of having to blow out the background. Plus, Audry is obviously a gorgeous bridesmaid and I loved her aviators, so, all in all, I was really pleased with the overall look.

The image to the right is my edit in Bridge, which is nothing difficult or fancy. You can see the changes (along with the EXIF data) on the screenshot right below.

Another little tip to get the most color out of your images is to make sure you’re editing and saving in sRGB mode. For a long time, I wondered why the images I was editing looked so different once I imported them in Facebook or checked my blog from a different computer. I noticed that the colors looked dull and washed out. Finally, I did a little research and discovered that sRGB mode is the only one that translates into true color representation on the web. I honestly don’t know all the technical mumbo jumbo reasons for this… you’ll have to look on other blogs for that kind of stuff. But if you’re like me, and you like solutions without always having to have a ten page explanation, then just do this. On the bottom of your Bridge window, look where these red arrows point. Just click that and choose sRGB mode if you haven’t already:

Then, in Photoshop, go to Edit>Assign Profile, and select sRGB like below:

Then just make sure when you save, that you’re also saving in the assigned profile.

For me, these basic edits in Bridge work for me for about 70% or more of my shots. I’ve really tried to simplify my workflow over the past year, and the better I’ve gotten at getting great exposures with the right light, the easier it’s gotten for me.

But sometimes, there are images that you just want to take to the next level. For those, there are a few things I’ll do in Photoshop to make them extra special.

For starters, for dialing up the color even MORE than I did in Bridge with the contrast and vibrance controls, there are a couple of actions I like.

Here, on the left, is the image from above, with the Oh Snap! action from Totally Rad Actions run at 100%. On the right is Daily Multivitamin from Kubota’s actions run at 100%. You can see they have a similar effect, with Oh Snap being a little bolder and brighter.

And then sometimes, basic color popping isn’t quite enough. To indulge the artist in me, I use a handful of favorite actions to create color shifts. I used to be a lot more heavy-handed with actions, using all sorts of them and piling on 18 million of them until the images were completely inconsistent and almost unrecognizable. Now, I’ve narrowed it down to my very favorites, and I hardly ever use any of them at their full 100% opacity, and usually mix 2 or more of them to get the look I love. But just for illustration purposes, I’m going to show you what each of them looks like at 100% below:

[from left to right, top to bottom: Get Faded from TRA, Memory of a Friend from Jesh de Rox, Pool Party from TRA, and Warm 70's Love, Before Dusk, and Sound of Laughter, all from Jesh de Rox]

Now I know what you might be thinking. What do I do when I DON’T have those perfect sunny skies and lighting conditions? Well, I’ll show you what I did with an image I took at Sarah and Orion’s wedding, which was in typically cloudy, overcast Oregon weather. I liked the change of pace, and the soft light was really nice. But I DO love color, so fortunately we had some awesome accessories and a sweet backdrop (KnitPurl) to offer some fun colorful bursts. Here’s the image SOOC:

And here is my “standard” edit:

And HERE is the final image, which I took into Photoshop to give a little extra lovin’:

Now, here’s an image I took INSIDE KnitPurl. As excited as I was about the oodles of gorgeous yarn, it definitely wasn’t easy to work with the tight spaces and fairly dark interior. I decided to use the available light from an overhead spotlight, positioning Sarah right under it, and I had to shoot at my widest aperture and still bump my ISO all the way up to 1000 (because I shoot with a 5D, the fear of grain wasn’t nearly as bad as when I used a cropped-sensor camera exclusively). Here is the SOOC image:

And here is my edit. It took a little more tweaking because the white balance was way off, but I’m pretty happy with what I was able to do.

And HERE is the final image, after I took it into Photoshop and did a few more tweaks to make it more “me”:

So yeah… I guess that’s about it! I hope this helps you see that it’s possible to make images colorful and fun even if you don’t always have killer locations and light to work with. Whenever I shoot now, I try to always keep in mind what my style is, and what I want the final image to communicate to the viewer about me and my point of view. Since I’ve started doing this, I’ve gotten a lot braver about taking control of situations to get the image I want. This doesn’t mean I’m rude or bossy… it just means that when a particular situation just isn’t working, I’m no longer afraid to just say, “Hey, let’s try something different now! How about we move over here and do this?” If it means getting great light or a less distracting background, it’s completely worth it.