Photo Image
by Michiel Kamermans

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Enhance

You might be familiar with the Enhancer filters for SLR camera lenses. What they do is to enhance the red aspect of an image, while not (or very slightly) adding red to the green and blue areas of the image. You may now wonder whether this filter is obsolete due to the "Color Balance" feature of Photoshop. Well, no. Color balance adds a new red value to every pixel, not just to the red ones - it creates odd values for green and blue too. This filter enhances the red only if a color has less than 4% red in it. It enhances red and reduces green and blue with a minor amount (5 if both sliders are at 255) - if there is more than 4% of red in the pixel. The options are:

Enhance	This increases the red component, and if there is more than 4% red, also slightly blue and green.
Multiply	This multiplies the enhancment value by increments of 1 multiplication per value of 20.

Enhance might come in handy for shots of forest or general nature stuff. It is also a nice alternative to a red-enhancing color-balance operation. Try it, it's quite usefull with some images!

Original Image	100 Enhance
100 Enhance, 100 Multiply	255 Enhance, 100 Multiply