Sometimes the colors in your image aren’t quite right and it’s not all of them but perhaps one in particular. White balance, saturation and vibrance adjustments affect the whole image, so how do you target specific colors? In Lightroom it’s easy.
HSL adjustments
HSL stands for 'hue', 'saturation', 'lightness', and it's a way of displaying different color ranges in photographs. HSL adjustments let you change the brightness, saturation and hue of individual colors or color ranges.
Color editing is the secret sauce of photo enhancement
All image-editors offer color controls that let you target a specific color or color range and then change its hue, saturation or lightness. In this example, I’m using the Color Editor in Capture One, but any photo editor with HSL color controls will let you do the same.
Can you intensify color by reducing it?
Color is a complex thing. It doesn’t get its intensity solely from saturation, but also from contrast. This can include color contrast with colors on opposite sides of the color wheel, brightness contrast between bright and dark colors, and another type of contrast we can call ’saturation contrast’. This is where you contrast strongly saturated […]
HSL color editing and how it works
You’re probably used to digital images being in the RGB mode, where the full range of colors is generated with red, green and blue color ‘channels’. But most photo editing programs offer a color editing mode based around the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) color model, and this is where it gets really interesting.
HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) adjustments and what they can do
Global HSL adjustments aren’t very useful. If you shift the global hue of an image it quickly looks wrong. The real strength of the HSL system is the way it lets you separate and edit individual colors.