Here’s a brand new way to make your photos more vibrant in Lightroom. The problem with vibrance is that when you push it too far, the colors will turn weird and unnatural. Most people assume that vibrance is as good as it can get it. But I personally think there’s room for improvement which is why I made for you some new Lightroom profiles that will give you the ability to boost the vibrance further with more natural results. This is the very first time you can do this in Lightroom and if you’re interested, keep reading and I’ll show you how it works.
Colorboost Lightroom Profiles
Let’s dive right in and see how it works. First, you’ll need to download the Lightroom profiles. It will only work with Lightroom or Lightroom Classic CC. After you’ve installed it, you can go into the Profile browser here and you’ll see a bundle of profiles that will boost the colors.
So here’s how it works. In this photo, if we use the vibrance you can see that the photo does look more vibrant but pizza has a mustard yellow color shift that does not look appetizing at all. The same thing happens with saturation. In case you’re wondering, we’re pushing the colors really far so that you can see what’s happening.
Here’s the same photo with the Colorboost VC profile at 100% opacity. As you can see, it’s more vibrant yet the colors are more natural. The colors are so vibrant that some of the green peppers here start to look neon. Yet you won’t get the mustard yellow color shift that you’d get with vibrance or saturation.
By the way, with these profiles, a little goes a long way. The profiles at 100% are actually more powerful than the vibrance or saturation at 100% so in many scenarios, you don’t even need to go more than 50%.
Colorboost NC
With the free download, you’ll get two Colorboost profiles. The first one is Colorboost NC (Neutral Colors) which will boost neutral colors and leave the already-vibrant colors alone. For example, in this photo the grass in the middle is a lot more vibrant than the other colors. Colorboost NC will emphasize the effect on the less vibrant colors while leaving the grass alone.
Here’s a comparison between vibrance and Colorboost NC. The red areas indicate that the colors are out-of-gamut – they’ve been pushed too far. As you can see, Colorboost NC gives roughly the same amount of vibrancy but with better results.
Colorboost VC
The second profile is Colorboost VC (Vibrant Colors) which will do the opposite of Colorboost NC. It will let you boost the vibrant colors while protecting the neutral colors. This photo has a lot of neutral colors like the white walls and gray rocks. When you pump the vibrance or saturation, these rocks turn yellow which does not look good at all.
With the Colorboost VC profile, you can increase the vibrancy but keep it looking natural. And as you can see in this comparison, it looks more vibrant and natural at the same time. The best thing about Colorboost VC is that it really makes the colors pop with the contrast between the neutral and vibrant areas. Again, we’re obviously pushing colors further than what you’d typically do so that you can see the difference.
Further Adjustments
You can further refine your colorboost in the Saturation section. Here you can fine tune the colors and get the perfect look. I typically like to use a stronger setting on the profile and then selectively lower it in the saturation settings.
Colorboost Pro
If you love these Lightroom profiles and you want even more, then upgrade to the Pro version. First of all, if you upgrade to the Pro version (Use code DENNYSTIPS for 10% off!), thank you so much for your support. I really appreciate it and your support means a lot to me. With Colorboost Pro, you’ll get a lot more profiles which will let you fine tune the look even further.
First, there’s a landscape mode which will give you deeper blue skies similar to what Adobe tries to do with vibrance.
If you shoot portraits, you’re going to love the portrait mode. It lets you boost colors while protecting skin tones.
Finally, the shadows, midtones and highlights mode let you target the colorboost to a specific tonal range. It’s similar to luminosity masking.
Examples
Here are some before and after examples of what you can do with Colorboost Pro. Special thanks to Ty Bowmaker for providing his photos for these examples. He’s a great photographer from Australia who’s nonstop traveling and creating. Make sure you check him out on Instagram and YouTube.
I hope that you’ll find these Lightroom profiles useful. This product is actually my imagination of how Vibrance could work in the future. Don’t get me wrong, I think Vibrance is great and it was a huge improvement over the old saturation adjustment. But we shouldn’t stop at Vibrance – there’s a lot more room for improvement and I’d love for Adobe and other developers to reimagine some of their existing tools and how we process our photos. There’s so much in the postprocessing world that I truly believe can be improved upon. This Colorboost product is just one small example.
