Color Booster [Lightroom Preset]

What does it do?

Have you ever wanted to make one color in your photos stand out more, but overall your image is already quite saturated and you don't want it to become overcooked?? I did! In this kind of situation, Perceived saturation is our best option!

Perceived saturation is how vivid a color looks based on its contrast with surrounding colors—dulling or darkening other tones makes an untouched color seem more saturated. So instead of adding even more saturation to our image, we will dull down the brightness of its surrounding colors. And yes, this will affect our exposure a bit.

Why Reducing Brightness in Other Colors Makes One Color Look More Saturated

• Relative Perception – Our eyes perceive the saturation of one color by comparing it to the colors around it. If most of the image is darker and less vibrant, the untouched color stands out more because it's now the brightest and most intense hue in the scene.
• Contrast Effect – Reducing brightness in other colors increases contrast between them and the untouched color. Higher contrast makes the untouched color appear richer and more vivid, even if its actual saturation hasn’t changed.
• Visual Dominance – Brightness (luminance) affects how we see saturation. A color surrounded by darker tones draws more attention and appears more saturated because it isn’t competing with similarly bright colors.

This tool is ideal for situations in which you:

• want more color pop but want to avoid oversaturated colors
• subtly darken surrounding colors to make your subject stand out, and direct the viewer's eye towards it
• fix dull or flat lighting. You can rescue overcast or low-contrast photos by boosting key tones
• 
  

🧐How to use:

The perceived saturation of colors is a difficult topic, but using this preset is now.

1. Apply the preset
2. Go to your mask tabs and look for Color Boost
3. Select the color range inside the Color Boost mask
4. Use the eyedropper tool to pick the color you want to boost
5. Adjust globally for the exposure loss (optional)
   

🔥 Pro Tip:

Pair it with the Visual Helper preset to see tonal values clearly before boosting colors!

WARNING: Your Lightroom Version has to be somewhat recent.

The Lightroom Border presets won't work with versions of Lightroom that do not have a curve adjustment inside their masks panel.

LICENSE:

Purchase of these Lightroom presets and Camera profiles grants the buyer a personal, non-transferable, and non-exclusive license to use the presets. This license strictly prohibits resale, redistribution, or sharing of the presets in their original or any modified form, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

INSTALLATION:

Copy the .xmp files to the specific folder:

• Windows: C:Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings
• macOS: User Library>Application Support>Adobe>CameraRaw> Settings

Here you can make as many subfolders and organize the files however you see fit as Lightroom won't care and it will load everything.

To learn how to add any presets to Lightroom you can follow these steps:

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/kb/faq-install-presets-profiles.html