On a recent morning, I went out to photograph Lake Arthur, about a 40 min ride from my home. It was a bland and cloudy day and I made this photograph….which shows just how overcast and seemingly monochrome the scene was. This is the processed image as it came out of Lightroom.

I obviously could have added more contrast to it, but I like leaving myself room at both ends of the histogram when a photo comes out of Lightroom, because I complete my processing in Photoshop and want to have some leeway before clipping occurs.

Though I say ‘seemingly monochrome’, it is obvious that there are some colors in the image. One could argue that this might make a nice black and white photo, but I was looking for color and wanted to bring out the colors that I know are hiding in the photo.

The first question is what colors are actually there? The answer in this, and many other cases like this, can be rather surprising.

Any image can ultimately be broken down to the colors or hues in it at 100% saturation and then with brightness and saturation layers and appropriate masking it can be restored to its original appearance. I have an action from a course I took that will do just that. It takes any image and constructs one layer of hue, meaning a layer that has every pixel’s hue at 100% saturation, and then adds a layer for saturation and brightness along with the appropriate masks and then puts a black background under the layers. When all the layers are turned on, the image appears completely unchanged. But with just the hue layer on you can discover what actual colors are hidden in your image, albeit at 100% saturation. So let’s see what colors this photo is actually made of. Here we go:

The blue isn’t all that surprising, but the colors in the sky was and, perhaps to a lesser extent the foreground water. My goal then was to bring these colors out and separate them to some degree in order to add some color contrast. I undertook this challenge using a variety of Photoshop tools, plug-ins, etc to achieve this final image. I should note that I didn’t paint in any colors, I just manipulated the ones that were already there to get to this point:

Just for fun, let’s rerun the action and take a look at what colors the final image contains.

It isn’t 100% necessary, but it can be of value, and it is certainly of interest, to know what colors an image is actually comprised of.

Finding The Colors

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