making colors "pop"- GIMP

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Pop as in vibrancy and hue, not selective color :)

Can any one recommend tips or tutorials? I was looking at some sunset photos earlier and the colors were just soooooo vibrant and bright, but obviously not SOOC. I'm pretty good with GIMP, but have struggled with this one thing for awhile. Looked up on google, couldn't find anything worth trying.

Thanks in advance :)
 
GIMP tutorials - Google Search

Pop is usually more about the lighting than the color. 'Pop' is also known as separation. A basic tenent of the visual arts is "light advances, dark receeds". In other words having the background somewhat darker than the primary image subject makes the primary subject 'pop' from the background.
 
I gtg drop the kids off at the pool (literally, lol) but I will research a few things. I think I have a some good tips and idea for you.
 
Given how you posed your question, you may already be aware that the visual appearance of saturation is not always tied to a color's mathematical description of it's saturation. You can have a very saturated color, but it may appear mute if it has high luminance. Thus, vibrancy, or how saturated a color appears, is tied to it's brightness.

The most basic way of increasing vibrancy is to increase contrast in RGB mode. Because saturation is directly coupled with and influenced by the brightness of the RGB composite channels, adjusting contrast will cause less vibrant colors to become more washed out, while making more vibrant colors even more bold - incidentally while adjusting tonal contrast, you are also adjusting saturation contrast.

Adjusting saturation contrast makes an image appear more vibrant because the eye is drawn to more saturated colors over less saturated colors. By making areas of high vibrancy more accessible to the eye, we interpret the adjustment as an increase to vibrancy.

Having clean, desaturated hilights is probably the biggest thing that will help the appearance of vibrancy. We expect brighter regions to be desaturated, and having a color cast in the hilights permits them to compete for our attention with what the eye expects to be more vibrant.

Very few tools allow you to adjust saturation directly, without adjusting hue and luminance as well. One way to do this is to place a curves adjustment on saturation layer mode in an RGB color space, though this method is a bit kludgy and doesn't really work linearly.

Some tools do permit you to adjust saturation directly. Photoline32 does, and I believe that this is planned for GIMP in the future. Experimental techniques I've employed using Blender have also been very powerful. If you're interested in this approach, feel free to PM me for details.

What GIMP does permit is HSL decomposition, which splits the layers into HSL components, with the S component representing saturation. You can then apply a curve to this directly and compose the HSV image back into an composite color image. With practice, you could probably be able to predict how the results will turn out.

I can think up at least one other way, but it's weird and too complicated to describe here. Let me know if you're interested.

The other way to control vibrancy is through simultaneous contrast, which is how the eye perceives color when placed next other colors. For example, if you have a red object next to a blue object, adjusting the blue object to be even slightly more cyan/green will cause the red object to appear more vibrant.

I have also tried some approaches in HSL Hue Curves, by making warmer colors warmer and cooler colors cooler in increase vibrancy. This technique is subtle, but can work provided you don't get too carried away, it may also be carried out in Hue/Sat.

Simultaneous contrast is kind of a tricky subject, for which I don't have as much experience with. Every color has simultaneous contrasting pairs, so the technique can be applied in any situation. The issue is how it should be carried out and controlled. It's theory is pioneered by Josef Albers and is covered in his book, The Interaction of Color. For a very broad, technical understanding of this subject, I would recommend this book - not though, this is not a book on photography, digital or otherwise, but rather strictly about color theory.
 
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take a look at this. I can't use it on my Mac, and I am having a hard time interpreting what exactly some of those "Saturation Curves" are doing. But there might be something to it:

Lab curves for GIMP - mm-log
 
^^ While there is no "magic button", there are general principles in color theory that can be applied to any image. OP is a very intelligent person, so I really don't doubt that she is unable to grasp these concepts.
 
The problem with GIMP is it's 8-bit, so it can't handle raw images. And raw is what you may need to really get the results you want.

I doubt many images you see that have what you're looking for are PP'd in 8-bit.
 
I'd have to say it's cloning out the fire hydrant.

Joe
 
As a matter of fact, I can.

There are a lot of factors here. The most obvious is the red fire hydrant being removed which makes the man's face the warmest element in the image. The background is actually quite desaturated by comparison, while the face is also brighter.

The background also has been muted by removing variation in tones, further allowing the subject uncompetitive access to how we read the image.

Because our eye is drawn to warm colors as well as lighter colors, the man's face becomes the dominant feature. Furthermore, warm colors appear to our mind as in the foreground, while cooler colors appear in the background, so there is a simultaneous contrast element as well.
 
How about a real example using GIMP:

Here's a photo under classic full sunlight of a scene with a full contrast range. I took the camera JPEG, white balanced it and used Levels to normalize the tone response and I got the top photo -- very close to the camera JPEG as cameras do pretty well under classic conditions. "Pop" is not a photographic term but I think I know what Jess is after -- the bottom photo.

$paper_mill.jpg

In GIMP starting with the top photo: From the Windows menu select Dockable Dialogs/Layers. In the Layers palette right click on the background layer and from the pop up menu select Duplicate. Do it again so there are two dupes of the original.

What we're going to do is going to raise contrast and the shadows are already dark enough. So click on the top dupe layer and from the Colors menu select Threshold. Pull the slider to the left until the value is 60 -- that's the shadows now showing black. Click OK. Now from the Select menu get By Color and click anywhere that's white. Back in the Layers palette right click on the Threshold layer and delete it.

Now select the top of the two remaining layers and right click on it. From the menu select Add Layer Mask. In the Layer Mask dialog click the radio button next to Selection and click OK. That mask will protect the shadows from the coming effect. NOTE: This could be done reversed to protect the highlights.

In the Layers dialog at the top where it says Mode change it from Normal to Soft Light. That's too much so reduce the opacity an appropriate amount.

One last step. Click directly on the mask on the top layer and then from the Filters menu select Blur/Gaussian Blur and the value will depend on the resolution of the image -- for this image I used 8. Blur the mask.

Form the Image menu select Flatten Image. Contrast and Saturation have been increased. The supreme advantage of the Soft Light Blend is that it typically does not blow out the highlights in the process.

NOTE: Jess used the term vibrancy as well as Pop. Maybe I'm just and old curmudgeon but these non-photographic terms disturb me because they are undefined, sic. see above discussion. Photographers have a vocabulary that has been refined for over a century and it helps us identify what we're seeing. I think that's a good idea. Pop is an eastern slang term for a sugary carbonated beverage or a sudden loud noise.

Here's a link to the full-res original if you'd like to try it: http://photojoes.org/paper_mill_01.jpg

Joe
 
Simply desaturating the image does not explain the whole situation, while tonal contrast is the most significant factor here, I maintain that saturation is still playing a significant role in the image. I would even go as far to say that the comparison between a black and white and color version is like apples to oranges since color relies on and is affected by luminance. Furthermore the hydrant is not muted relative to the rest of the image.

If you measure saturation between the man's face and the hydrant, both are around 40-70%, while in the edit the background is pretty much uniformly around 40%.

If this were not the case, then the hydrant would not have been so substantially distracting.

---

In the case of the wheat field the eye is drawn to the exception, like sorting out a predator or food source amongst green leaves. Just as we would notice a white square over a normally dominant black field, we notice a blue tractor over a normally dominant yellow background.
 
Just for the sake of example, here is another edit where warmer colors were made warmer, cooler colors were made cooler, saturated colors more saturated and less saturated colors made less saturated. Notice that overall luminance remains constant, without risk to the bright steam, but the appearance of contrast is increased:

$paper_mill.jpg
 
snip...I don't use Gimp, so I can't describe the changes in terms of Gimp tools...

OK, the OP does use GIMP; that was actually in the post title.

So just for comparison -- that's great:

$mill_compare.jpg

Why the big change in white balance? Are unrealistic colors part of how you define "pop?" I see the gradient you placed in the sky but the color is now a hue value that does not occur in the sky on planet earth -- I'm not gettin' that. And as a result you've really desaturated the warm colors in the mill. I thought "pop" typically meant an increase in saturation -- Jess did use the term vibrancy; not that I'm endorsing that term but it has recently come to mean an increase in saturation. You've in fact decreased saturation in everything except the sky. You mention opening shadow details, but in fact you did the opposite, your shadows are darker than mine...hmm?

Joe
 
Peano's image I think does represent vibrancy, and actually the desaturated warm colors do help achieve this. If all the colors were equally saturated, you don't get that vibrant "pop" because more color elements must compete for our attention. By having a light, lower saturated subject against a dark, higher saturated background, you will achieve some sense of vibrancy. Vibrancy is not merely a global increase of saturation, it's an increase in saturation relative to some other element.

As for the colors being inaccurate, I don't really mind that. Because we're dealing with "vibrancy" and not absolute saturation, there is some interpretive representation. In this case, the sky is represented as "bluer than blue", even if it's not objectively accurate.
 

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