Boost up colors using black and white tones

A simple and useful tutorial where you will learn how to amplify colors and contrast with the help of black and white toning.

Open a photo you want to make more appealing.

Click the Create new fill or adjustment layer ...

... and choose Back & White...

Choose Soft Light as a blending mode for the new adjustment layer.

You should already notice some nice changes on your photo.

But let's see how to make the photo even more appealing.

I want to make the sky a bit more deeper blue.

I had to reduce the value of Blues in the black and white settings panel (see picture).

Experiment with slider, reduce or increase the settings and observe the changes on your picture.

I will now boost up the greens just a bit.

Changing the Yellows will usually get you better results when correcting the green colors as with the actual Greens slider.

Again experiment with the settings.

As you can see on my photo, the trees look much better as they did before.

Now, let's learn a new trick supported by Adobe Photoshop CS4 and newer.

Click the Click and drag in image to modify a slider button ...

... now click and hold you mouse on the color of your choice ...

... and drag your mouse left or right.

See the changes? It's a cool way to speed up your work.

At the end, if needed reduce the Opacity of the adjustment layer too soften the contrast a bit.

Now click the little eye button next to your adjustment layer to make it uninvisible so you can see the difference from your original picture.

Don't forget to make the adjustment layer visible again before you save your picture.

This is how my photo ended up looking.

And this is how the original looks like.