Photoshop Tutorial: Use Colour Match to Enhance Your Photos

This simple tutorial will explain how to enhace an image’s colours by harnessing the colours in other photos.

Like a lot of people I’m not very well-versed in Adobe Photoshop. But I do have to use it from time to time, mainly to touch up photographs. Without formal training or experience in Photoshop, editing and adjusting photos can be frustrating, especially when you aren’t familiar with the myriad of controls, options and panels available in Adobe’s product.

You might often find that you have a strong idea of how you want the photo to be improved, but have a hard time actually getting results with Photoshop. But by using the colour match tool to sample photos that already possess some of the qualities you want in your picture, you can often achieve the effect you desire with very little technical Photoshop experience.

Step 1: Get two photos; one photo that you wish to colour-adjust, and one photo that you wish to use as the colour source for your adjustments. For this tutorial I will use a photo of a flower that I want to make more vibrant.

For the second photo you will need something that has colours similar to your photo, but with more of the qualities you want. In this case we have two simple colours, mainly green and pink, but I want them to be more bold and vibrant. For our colour source I will be using another picture of a flower, under a CC license courtesy of Kevin Law.

Step 2: Now that we have both our images, open them both up in Photoshop. Make sure that the image you want to edit is selected. Next go to the Image menu, highlight Adjustments, then click Match Colour. The colour match dialogue box will open.

Step 3: In the colour match dialogue box, click on the Source drop down menu, and select the image you want to use as the colour source. In this case it is samplex1.jpg.

Once the source image is selected you will see the image you are editing shift in colour to reflect the colours adopted from your colour source image. As you can see the colours don’t look quite right yet, so we’ll have to do a bit of adjusting.

Step 4: The colours look too bright and not enough of the image’s older colours are coming through, so we’ll make some adjustments. Lowering the Luminance slider a bit will descrease the brightness, making the brightness of the new colours match that of the photo we are editing, which is darker than the colour source. Also, increasing the Fade will decrease how strongly the new colours come through in our photo, and increase how much the original photo’s colours appear. We want to decrease the harshness of these colours, but not so much that we can’t see the difference, so we will increase the fade to 50.

We don’t need to touch the Colour Saturation slider this time, but if you find that some colours are drowning out others, this slider can be adjusted as well.

Step 5: Once you have adjusted your photo to your liking, simply press OK.

The colour match tool is a great way to edit your photos without having to deal with palettes and individual colour saturations. Looking at a photo and saying, “those are the colour I want” is easier than meticulously adjusting each variable of your photo. Further, this trick helps you speed up your work and avoid the more technical aspects of Photoshop.

There some other neat uses for the colour mathc tool as well. If you’re looking to give a series of photos a similar colour scheme, use colour match to make them more consistent. Or check out this link to see how you can use classic paintings to make your photo’s colours really stand out.

Of course, like any trick, colour match isn’t perfect. You still have to go and find a photo that possesses the colours you need, and like any quick solution, it isn’t an excuse to avoid learning more about Photoshop. But, it never hurts to have a method like this at your disposal.

Here are the original photo and the adjusted photo side by side for comparison.