I have never had to fight a photograph to make it less colourful anywhere except here in Portland.

Standing at that wall with the sun coming across it, the greens growing out of the stone were doing something no slider setting was going to fix later. Portland greens are not the gentle greens of a field in Scotland. These greens glow with the neon radiance of a highlighter. And the sky behind the chimney pots was that thick tropical blue that looks fake the moment you add any saturation to it.

Every editing tutorial I learned from was made by somebody standing in a desert or a fog bank, wanting more colour than the scene gave them.

I have the exact opposite problem. My scenes give too much color.

Let's talk about that.

I Take the Colour Out of Jamaica

Same walls as last week: Fort George, the chimney pots, plants growing out of 1729 stonework.

Here's what will look like a mistake when you see the panels.

In Calibration, I push saturation up. In Color Mixer, I pull it straight back down: the hammer and the chisel.

That's not indecision. That's the method.

Jamaican green is not landscape green

It's dense, it's wet, it sits at a hue most camera sensors already overcook, and in Portland, there happens to be an enormous amount of it in every frame I make. Factor in the surrounding harbour and the problem only compounds; that blue-green water looks beautiful to the eye but goes neon the moment a raw processor touches it.

So the standard advice, find the colour and bring it up, gives you a garish screensaver. The picture stops being a place and becomes an advert for one.

Desaturating everything doesn't work either. Then you lose Jamaica.

You need colour with character, at a volume that doesn't shout. Two jobs. Two panels.

Calibration builds the character (The Hammer)

• Red Primary — Hue +8, Sat +15
• Green Primary — Hue +20, Sat +15
• Blue Primary — Hue −27, Sat +34

The saturation numbers are obvious. The hue numbers matter more.

Green Hue +20 pulls the greens off yellow toward a truer, cooler green. That one slider does more for a Jamaican frame than any amount of HSL work, because most of what looks wrong about tropical vegetation is that it drifts yellow.

Blue Hue −27 pushes the blues toward cyan, where Caribbean water actually lives. Saturation +34 gives them depth.

Calibration sits underneath everything and changes the whole file rather than picking off ranges. Blunt. That's why it's right for character.

Color Mixer refines the hues (The Chisel)

Yellow −14 · Green −29 · Aqua −24 · Blue −18 · Red +5

Every channel I just built up, I'm now pulling down.

Red goes up five, because the terracotta pots and the rust in the dead grass are the only warm things in the frame, and they carry the composition.

Calibration decides what kind of green it is. Color Mixer decides how loud.

Vibrance −10, Saturation +11

Looks like it cancels. It doesn't.

Saturation lifts everything evenly. Vibrance hunts the quietest colours — which here means it goes straight for the vegetation, the one thing that needs no help.

Vibrance down stops it inflating the greens. Saturation up lifts the frame. Stone, sky, and terracotta gain presence and depth while the foliage doesn't get out of control.

Dehaze −12. Clarity −7.

Both negative, deliberately.

Portland takes up to 150 inches of rain a year. The air has weight. Distance is soft, and sunlight is diffused even under a clear sky.

Everyone treats dehaze as one-way: drag right, cut the murk and make the image crisp and crunchy. However, stripping away all the atmosphere doesn't render Jamaica correctly; plus, the atmosphere adds character and presence to your highlights.

Negative dehaze puts the air back. Negative clarity keeps edges from going crunchy.

The curve barely worked

I owe you this, having spent a whole issue on tone curves.

Region: Lights +15, Darks −15. The gentlest S you can draw. Base prep unchanged from week two — Whites −80, Blacks +100.

The shaping didn't happen in the curve. It happened in colour.

Some pictures are tonal problems. Some are colour problems. The skill is knowing which one is in front of you before you start dragging.

Colour Grading, last

Cool shadows, warm highlights, Balance +17.

That's just the light on the wall. Late sun on stone is warm; whatever the sun isn't touching goes blue because the sky is lighting it. I'm agreeing with what was already there.

If you take one thing

Build colour in Calibration. Restrain it in Color Mixer.

Do it all in one panel, and you're choosing between flat and garish. Split the job — one panel for character, one for volume — and the place gets to look like itself.

Especially a place this loud.

One Frame

A Location Note

Shooting greens in Portland — the hours that make the edit easier.

Harsh midday sun is what breaks tropical green. It drives the leaves toward yellow, blows the specular highlights off every wet surface, and gives you a colour no amount of Calibration work fully recovers.

Overcast is your friend here in a way it isn't in drier places. Cloud cover pulls the greens back toward the hue you actually want and takes the shine off the foliage, so you arrive in Lightroom with less to undo. Also, a Polarizing filter is a lifesaver in any light.

Failing that, work the first and last two hours. Late sun across a subject — like this wall — gives you warm stone against cool shade, which is a colour contrast you can build on rather than a colour problem you have to solve.

And if you're shooting anywhere near the water, expect to spend most of your Color Mixer time on Aqua rather than Blue. The harbour sits in that range, not in true blue, and it's the channel that will betray you on export.

Reply with a frame where the colour beat you — one you couldn't get to look like the place felt. I'll tell you which panel I'd start in.

There are nine of us reading this. If one person came to mind while you were reading, forward it to them. At this size, that isn't a formality — it's the entire growth strategy, and I notice every single one

Instagram — the frames that don't make the newsletter

YouTube — the longer version, with the mistakes left in

The Photon v1 base prep — my full RAW starting point, free, no email gate.

download preset

First Photons — Jamaica. See you at first light.