where'd the love go?

First of all, this kind of coloring works best with lighter and less yellowish scenes, so I took this one from Cheryl:

In this type of coloring, it’s important to go slowly, remember you can always add more layers!

As you can see, the scene is clear but still need more light, so, let’s do that. I recommend you to start with the curves layer, and also add a little contrast with it. Mine looks like this.

Now you can start working with the Selective Color. As you want a colorful edit, work adding more reds and yellows, basically it’s important to, at first, put the cyans in the reds in negative numbers, so the reds will look more vibrant. It’s also important to add yellows in the same reds layer, so that your reds won’t look pink. I hope this wasn’t too confusing, so, here’s mine.

Remember to always take baby steps, things will take place in the end!

Now you can add more light with the Levels, and also add more depth to your coloring. Mine was 8/1,18/255. Add more Brightness and Contrast and my coloring is looking like this so far:

Okay, so we got the brightness, let’s start working more with the colors! To make things a little bit more yellow, I use the Hue/Saturation layer and increase the Hue in +3. Now I add a little bit more curves with a contrast a little bit bigger, and another Selective Color layer, but now I’ll work with the yellows. Ofc, you’ll add more yellow because you don’t want a pinkish effect. Mine looked like this, and you can also change the blacks, adding more black in it.

Now you can add even more light, to enhance what you changed in the selective colors: go ahead and put more levels, brightness and contrast (that’s why i told you to take baby steps in this, because you put a lot of brightness/contrast in the beginning, you won’t be able to add more after and enhance your changes). My gif now looks like this:

Ok, now you can work with the Color Balance. Notice that it’s a little too cyan, so we will balance that, but not taking the yellow off because we want it!. So, I add more yellow in the shadows, but I played with the other colors

You can put another selective color with basically the same aspect of the first ones. Add more levels to enhance everything, and this is my coloring so far:

Now we’re almost getting what we want. Add the classic gradient map from black to white, put it in soft light and reduce the opacity, this will add a little contrast but without messing with the colors.

Notice that our gif is a little bit too yellow, so let’s take that excess off with another color balance layer, you know how it works now!

Ok, so that’s my gif so far:

Better, huh? Now let’s finally add more vibrance to it <3 Go ahead and add how much you think is necessary, i put +48 of vibrance and +5 of saturation. Great! but now the reds are too vibrant, so let’s put a Photo filter layer with the black color, and the default density: 25.

Good, but I think it looks too clear, so, i’ll put another levels layer but decreasing the lights, and that’s my final result:

Another example:

That’s it guys, it’s a simple effect but very pretty to my eyes <3 remember that it won’t work with most scenes, so you’ll have to adjust according to what you’re editing