How do we bring rich colors ??

[SV's FotoGraphi]

Hi All,

I am a starter and i am using a Nikon D3100 with 50mm / 1.8 and 55-300mm lens.
I want to know how to bring rich colors in photos we capture.Need suggestions / advice.

Thanks.

[graciousness]

Photoshop. Lightroom. Gimp. Aperture. iPhoto. Whatever editing suite you use. Use those saturation/vibrancy/contrast/adjustment levels to do however you want the colours to come out as.

Don't rely on your camera to do this for you, except if you shoot jpeg and you set your camera menus to 'process' however you want your camera to render your photos. Otherwise, it's all post processing.

[Zeke Menuar]

If you do not have Photoshop Lightroom etc the D3100 makes it easy to change the color richness/saturation.

Go the the "Shooting Menu>"Set Picture Control

Once at that screen you have different setting for color control..

Most of the time I use "Standard" setting with the Saturation bumped up +2 or the Neutral setting with the Saturation +2.

On rare occasions I use the Vivid setting. However I've found the Vivid setting can be a bit much.

I try to do as little post processing as possible. I don't own Photoshop or Lightroom. For me it's more important to learn the camera first before tackling complicated post processing software. YMMV.

If I have to change the saturation, contrast etc after the fact I use a program called Irfanview. It will do simple imaging manipulation as well as cropping, resizing etc. It can read RAW files if needed. And it's free.

I strongly recommend you get a copy of David Busch's big D3100 book. It explains everything about the D3100 in plain English.
Amazon.com: David Busch's Nikon D3100 Guide to Digital SLR Photography (9781435459403): David D. Busch: Books

[Krusty79]

A polarizer can help, depending on your angle relative to the sun.

Polarizers

[Tito87]

Slightly underexposing your shot can also help you. Just don't overdo it.

[Mike367]

If you shoot in RAW, you can make changes with ViewNX ( download for free from Nikon).

Then you can change the picture control from, for example, standard to vivid, if that gives the look you're after. Regardless of what picture control you choose, you can further adjust saturation (color boost) ,white balance, sharpness, exposure, highlights and shadow, and curves (launch utility). You can then save it and convert to a standard image format (I prefer .tiff) for further editing in another program such as Photoshop, Lightroom, GIMP (which is free), etc. None of the changes to the NEF file are permanent; you can always revert to the original.