Getting super-rich colours that make an image pop

Kentdub asked about super-saturation in This thread here I said I would explain how I do it. Thought a new thread would be best.

I do a lot of reflection shots in water, and you need to boost the colours to get anything from them. Here is one I did earlier (much earlier) You can only do this with RAW. This is as it came out of the camera - I just loaded it to Photoshop RAW editor (ACR)

http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...fromcamera.jpg

Pretty muddy isn't it? Bear with me...

I then pushed the contrast, vibrancy, clarity, and blacks. I also pushed the darks and lights in the tone curve of ACR - making the darks darker, and the lights lighter which will help boost the apperance of the colours, as you can see in the next views. Click for full image if you have trouble seeing the RAW editor sliders.

http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/.../rawcurves.jpg
http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/.../rawpostpp.jpg

That's better, isn't it?

Next, I exported it to Photoshop. Decided it needed a bit more colour so I used the Velvia photoshop action I have which boosts colours using the channel mixer - it basically selects each red/green/blue channel and boosts each one while at the same time reducing the other two to keep the overall balance. If you want a copy of this action then see this thread here Rob's Photoshop Actions I reduced the opacity of this Velvia action as it was too much, having already boosted the colours in RAW I think it ended up as 50%. This is what it looked like after the Velvia process was applied.

http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...shopvelvia.jpg

Finally, I cropped to square. I also flipped the image 180 deg vertical. I find with reflection in water like this one that flipping gives a more surreal look because it's not apparent that it's a reflection. It looks more like the real thing, but it is distorted naturally. Does that make sense?

Here is the final image. Isn't it amazing how much data is in a RAW file?

http://backup.cambridgeincolour.com/...sa1_colour.jpg