Andy Gock

Recently, about a week ago, i photographed the sunrise at Susan Gilmore Beach.

Its a small secluded beach here in Newcastle NSW with great looking rock formations. Ideal for long exposures though you need to get there at low tide.

I don’t usually shoot sunrises very often, but i specially got up for this one since low tide almost coincided with the sun rising so it seemed like an ideal time to do this. Here are some of the shots below:

This one below is probably my favourite for the morning. I used a bit of localised channel mixer based colour enhancement here. Keep in mind, i didn’t use it all that much, the sky really was close to that colour when i was there. I used a ND8 filter for this one. This is a single exposure, since i wasn’t shooting into the sun, the dynamic range in the scene was only small (say within 4 to 5 stops), enough to be captured in one shot with a digital camera.

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Welcome to my second tutorial, looks like we’ve made it for another one! Today we’ll talk about enhancing colours in a photograph. In particular, we’ll talk about increasing the saturation or vibrancy in an image. Not so much the changing of, or adding of color casts, but enhancing the look of the colours that are already in the photograph to begin with.

This is one of those subjects that if you ask 10 photographers, you’ll probably get 10 different answers on how they do it. For me, I have two methods I love to use, to enhance the colours in an existing photo. They are both Photoshop techniques.

Channel mixer

This method is quick and convenient, the feel of the image isn’t as good as the next “LAB method”, but for most purposes it works very well. This method is also often called “Velvia” action, mainly due to the look it produces which has a similar appearance to the highly saturated look of the famous Fuji Velvia transparency film.

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