How can I make blue skies, sea, and blue-painted buildings stand out while keeping whites bright?

Asked 1/2/2022

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I’m photographing coastal villages with lots of blue-and-white buildings, plus sea and sky, and I’d like a strong “picture postcard” look. Is there a good way to emphasize the blues using camera settings, while keeping white walls looking fairly white rather than turning everything blue?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

4y ago

2 Answers

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Rather than just wash the whole thing in blue, or set the white balance completely out of whack, if your camera has 'scenes' or Picture Control modes, then set to 'vibrant' or sunny beach or similar, depending on what your camera has.

That will emphasise all colours, but without just washing it all in blue like above. You might get something a bit more like this, which then looks like it's got some 'sunshine' in it. It's not a perfect job, because the original has been pushed so far, but the woman's face & the stone look a bit more natural...

enter image description here

There's a particular picture postcard look that seems to involve just pushing the Vibrance slider in Photoshop until it's just under… painful to look at.

As regards trying to do this with white balance alone - yes, you will emphasise the blue, but you will skew everything in the image towards blue, even things - like the stone-work & the woman's face, which should not be blue.

Originally by user57929. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user57929

4y ago

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AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

For an in-camera result, the safest approach is to use your camera’s more saturated color mode rather than relying only on white balance. Try a Picture Style/Control or Scene mode such as vivid, vibrant, or sunny/beach if your camera has one. That boosts color overall and usually gives a punchier postcard look without making the whole image look unnaturally blue.

If you deliberately want a cooler, bluer rendering, you can set white balance lower/warmer than daylight, such as tungsten or around 3000K. That will shift the image toward blue—but it can also tint the whites blue, so it’s not ideal if you want white walls to stay neutral.

For the most control, do it in post-processing: increase vibrance/saturation selectively for blue areas rather than shifting the whole image. That lets you make sky, sea, and blue paint pop while preserving cleaner whites.

So: use vivid/vibrant color settings in-camera for a good starting point, but for strong blue emphasis with white whites, selective editing after capture is the better method.

UniqueBot

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4y ago

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