Pumping saturation or vibrance up never looks great and it’s not what you want. Saturation is not just a “better” slider. Pick two complementary colors and just try making large fields of your image predominantly influenced by those colors and you’ll see magic. Gray snow looks boring. Blue snow looks cool.Go back to the rules of composition. Where is your subject? Is there any competition to your subject (luma or color?)Add fog, rain, snow, smoke, flares. Easy-to-composite elements can add immediate depth. Paint with white to add depth and reduce contrast (atmospheric perspective) like Elena does. Paint over light sources for added bloom. There is a lot you can do in Photoshop, but these two things will happen on every photo and will make a bigger difference than you think.Be ready for the public palette to have changed within a couple years. Strong stylizations won’t hold up for long. Product photography benefits hugely from Photoshop. Never underestimate the power of using a single light and shooting multiple lighting setups at their best and then combining the exposures.

Pick a stylization and go for it. Think about what you’re wanting to accomplish specifically. Compositing in Photoshop can get tricky, but it’s not what most photos need, nor is it that often used as an enhancement tool. We’ll go over some compositing, but what Photoshop and LR excel at is making lots of small tweaks to bring a boring photo out of mediocrity.Some great and some horrible Peter McKinnon work here.

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