Simple Image Editing to Pop Color in Photographs | Lightroom 4

Sometimes the easiest photo edits can also be the best edits to your images. There is a belief that editing photography should be hard or a skill learned over many years. (Usually this belief if held by photographers that feel pressure that the secret of photo editing is out!)

Since I am not one of those photographers... I wanted to share a quick tip on boosting colors in your images.

I feel the most creative I have to be during a wedding is during detail shots. Why? Because you are kind of creating your own still life. A still life with subjects that can be boring. Or at least repetative from wedding to wedding. Photographing people during a wedding is more like documenting what is happening at a wedding. Sometimes those people can be full of excitement and action and sometimes...well, not so much. But every wedding has flowers, rings, shoes, etc. Making ordinary inanimate objects "fit" into the wedding images is sometimes challenging.

What I try to personally do is find something exciting to display these items on. Hotels are usually awesome for this for they usually will have neat colors or patterns. Once I find something cool to shoot these items on, I try to make them pop a little more during editing. The images below were shot at a wedding last weekend. The wedding was held at a private residence. As soon as I walked into the living room, I knew instantly where I was going to set up the detail shots. There were two bright red chairs in the living room with this green table against the wall.

ALL flowers have green stems, so finding something red to shoot them against were going to work. I chose to also shoot them on this green table because the band and white flowers being white would totally pop once I brought the greens and yellows out in post. Bringing these colors out in post production is super simple. I use Lightroom for 90% of my editing and followed these steps once I had the image selected:

1. Increase contast
2. Increase Blacks
3. Adjust highlight slider to make sure detail is shown in the flowers and the band.
4. selected the most prevalent color on the color sliders (shown below, found in the Develop module)

When messing with the color sliders, you have to always make sure you aren't overdoing it. You can tell if you have gone to far.

You can also use this technique to remove color or lessen a color in an image. Say if a subject has too much red in their cheeks. You can bring down the saturation of reds to lessen the display of the reds in the image. This comes in handy a lot with shooting newborn photos, with babies sometimes having a bit of a red rashy look to their skin. 

If you don't have lightroom, these options are also available in FREE editing programs like (GIMP and iPhoto if you happen to have a mac)