There is a lot that can be done to photos to make them more vibrant and exciting. In this tutorial I will show you the basics of taking an old or under-saturated picture and optimizing it.

Here we have a picture that is lacking in color, and is over-exposed.

First we are going to adjust the hue and saturation. Click on Filters > Adjust Color > Hue/Saturation.

This will bring up a new window with three options. Hue, the first of the three, will adjust what colors are found in your photo. By sliding the bar you convert the colors that are already in your picture left or right on the color spectrum. We have a lot of reds and yellows in this photo, so lets move the bar to the left a bit and get some purple in there. Next we are going to adjust the Saturation, this is adjusting the amount of color. Moving it to the right will decrease the gray in the photo and increase the color.

After adjusting the hue and saturation my photo looks like the one below.

Now lets make things a little more vibrant by increasing the contrast. Click on Filter > Adjust Color > Brightness/Contrast. By increasing the contrast we are making the light colors lighter and the dark colors darker, which makes the lines in the picture seem more intricate.

After I finished I added a black border to the photo, here is how it turned out: