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I am an amateur photographer, I had a question how do professional photographers manage to make the green color so bright in their images.
For example:
Is this all done in post-processing? Could anyone tell me a Photoshop or Lightroom process to achieve this effect?
The question that you are asking is a very common one, but the answers are not as straight forward as you may think. How does a professional make the colors so bright, the contrast so well defined, the focus so perfect, etc ? Well, it isn't just one thing, ever. It isn't a single setting on the camera, or a single post processing technique or button. It is a combination of talent, skill, technique, equipment, patience, etc - all things that cannot be adequately described in a short answer such as this.
The article "Magic Camera Settings" by Thom Hogan really gives a great example of this. Many times amateur photographers are looking for one magic bullet, such as a setting or preset - but you will find none that gives such a general "pop" to photos, as it is a combination of many things.
I won't leave you without helping you out a bit though :) I would suggest picking up a circular polarizing filter. It will help a great deal in giving your greens a very rich vibrant green color. It also helps blues to pop, and can assist when reflections exist in the frame as well. As for post processing, you can use sliders in Lightroom for vibrance, saturation, and clarity to get the photos to pop. You also can single out the green channel and boost the saturation of just that. Don't go too overboard though or you will end up with a very fake looking photo.
You can give yourself a lot of help at capture time as well as in post-processing. A lot of the greying of leaves and grasses is reflection of the sky off of their protective waxy surface, and a polarizing filter can work wonders. So can a skylight or a mild warming filter (but don't forget to adjust your white balance to account for the filter). You can get the best of both worlds by using a warming polarizer, which is essentially an 81A or an 81B with a polarizing film in the same filter.
The other answers already posted have given some great advice for boosting the greens in post-processing.
To make your colours not only green to be bright, your photo firstly should be taken with proper exposure and secondly, you should use "Vibrancy" slider (not Saturation slider) in PS to add richness to the colour. As for the photos you put as example, third one is an HDR shot and this is a completely different type of post processing which usually takes 3-5 merged exposures to achieve this effect.
Then again, in some countries, especially in the semi tropics, colors are very green. Depending upon the camera, you can also use settings which enhance colors. Like in the Nikon you can set color to Landscape or Vivid, etc.
Last two images are HDR images; this technique produces overly saturated colors.
As for the original question:
To boost saturation of green colors simply play around with saturation in your favorite editing software. Try accessing individual color channels and adjusting saturation to your likings.
If you shoot in RAW and use Photoshop, play around with vibrance/saturation sliders. Also try accessing individual colors by going to HSL/Grayscale tab and adjust individual colors.
Be aware not to clip any color channels. By clipping, you lose data within that color channel. Photoshop will try to match lost data and guess the color it should be there, but most often you will see serrated transition between the color values. But this is mostly a concern if you are printing your photos relatively big. These bad transitions might not be evident in small prints like 6x4.
