There is plenty of excitement about low light photography made possible by the high-ISO settings and increasingly good noise reduction in the newest cameras. But lost in the shuffle is that color is also lost as we increase the ISO. High ISO images tend to be typified by a 'washed out' look that seriously detracts from the Wow of your image. The good news is that correcting much of that problem is much easier than most people think...

The simplest way to help restore some of the color saturation missing in your High ISO images is to use a little understood feature of Adobe's Raw file converter (either in Photoshop or Lightroom) called Camera Profiles. You'll find them under the small camera icon tab in the controls Camera Raw displays when you are converting your files. There you'll find a set of pre-defined profiles with somewhat ambiguous names like "Adobe Standard" or "Cameara Neutral." The key things to remember are the Adobe labeled versions are the ones Adobe creates from scratch for your camera while the Camera labeled ones are designed to duplicate the images produced by your camera.

For most D-SLRs you'll see a "Camera Vivid" profile. Simply clicking that profile as the one to use will load Camera Raw (or Lightroom) with the proper settings to restore much of the lost color to your image. The great thing about doing the correction at this stage is you are doing it to the raw file before it is interpreted, giving you a chance at doing it with the least damage to the file.

If you don't shoot raw or don't have the option of a Vivid profile, there are a couple other methods you can try. One simple way to go is to use a Lab Curve layer to bump up the color of your image without changing the contrast or tones. You can do this quickly with Mike Russell's Curvemeister plug-in (Windows only) or by hand using the techniques we outlined in our review of Dan Margulis' excellent book about Lab: The Canyon Conundrum. If that's too much hassle for you a simple Saturation adjustment (use a layer so you can change it later) will give you a similar result but not quite as pure in terms of affecting only the color without distorting the contrast.