Original image

Variations

Striplook with overlay blend mode

Bleach bypass with lightness decrease

Teal orange with screen blend mode

Edgy amber with screen blend mode

Sometimes you want to render the colour in your colour photographs exactly the way you saw it. And sometimes you don’t. In truth, often you don’t, if your goal is to create a mood or convey a feeling rather than simply document a scene.

And how many ways are there to change and tweak colour using image editing tools such as Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop or Lightroom? So many it makes my head spin. Plug-ins, presets, actions, not to mention using curves, LAB colour, hue/saturation adjustments and of course combinations of all of these.

But one way that I have become aware of only recently is Colour Lookup. (That’s what I love about Photoshop — I’ve been using it for 6 years and there are still features I’m discovering!)

This technique is fast, easy and can yield some nice results. It can be used for very subtle effects, which I prefer to over-the-top, more extreme changes.

I decided to take my recent iris image and play with it a bit to create a few other options to my original. I think I may even like some of these better! I’m particularly drawn to the slightly warmer tones.

Below is a link to an easy-to-follow tutorial:

How to use colour lookup in PS CS6 and CC

And now for an example of how you can use the technique to change the feel of a scene.

Original image

WIth the addition of edgy amber in soft light blend mode, opacity reduced

With the addition of late sunset, opacity reduced

Well, here’s to yet another tool in the ol’ image processing toolkit!