Woot~woot! Breathe life and vibrancy into your landscape photos with a touch of the Velvia look! Velvia film is known for its rich and saturated colours.

Though I kinda remember I've come across a similar tutorial in the PhotoMalaysia forum, I came across it again this morning at another local photographic forum Shutter Asia, and indeed I was glad! I almost totally forgot about this technique.

So, I tried with this old shot of the Tanjung Rhu beach which I took last year in Langkawi.

Before

After

Cool, eh! The tutorial was based on using Photoshop, but I did mine using the GIMP (coupled with some tweaking of Levels and Curves as well). I think if coupled with some skills in dodging and burning, those clouds could pop out even more! But sigh, I'm an idiot with all these post-processing (PP) tools :(

To achieve this Velvia look, you tweak the colours using Channel Mixer. The guided numbers for the different colour channels are as follows :

Output Channel : RED
RED = 150%
GREEN = -25%
BLUE = -25%

Output Channel : GREEN
RED = -25%
GREEN = 150%
BLUE = -25%

Output Channel : BLUE
RED = -25%
GREEN = -25%
BLUE = 150%

But of course, you can play around with the numbers to achieve the level of saturation you want. The rule of thumb is to make sure that the set of numbers for each of the channel outputs sums up to 100%.

I love simple techniques like this *LOL*

Labels: tips