Camera Raw: How To Balance Hue, Saturation & Luminance Values
https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - One of my favourite panels in Camera Raw has to be the HSL/Grayscale Panel. Now, HSL stands for hue, saturation, and luminance. If we go up to our Panel Options at the top here, you’ll notice that it’s fourth in from the left. If you click on it, you’ll see that you have three different tabs available to you. You have Hue, Saturation, and Luminance.
Now, these panels essentially allow you to make adjustments to specific color ranges. So you can potentially boost levels of one color relative to others and increase or decrease the saturation and luminance of different hues. Now, Hue tab itself allows you to change colors within a limited color range. So for instance, you can’t change blue to red, but you can change blue to sort of a cyan or to a purple, as you can see there. So it sort of allows you to change a specific color or hue to colors that sit either side of it in the color spectrum, whereas red would sit on the complete other end of the spectrum. So that’s why it’s not actually relative or just wouldn’t be right to be able to change that to a particular color.
So with that in mind, you can make fine adjustments to all the different colors in your images, which is really quite useful. For example, in this image, I find that I’d like to make my red sort of more orange. You can go in this direction, or you can go and actually make it sort of more magenta/pinky. So it does give you the ultimate control over your colors.
Now, saturation allows you to adjust the vividness of a color. So you could take a low, subdued color and make it more intense, or you could reduce the intensity of colors that just look unnatural. So in this particular example, I say the red may be too vivid for me. So I’d like to reduce the saturation of the red. You can see that it ends up looking quite washed out.
So you need to be quite careful of the amount that you dial into these types of sliders. Because in some cases, you may want to just make slight adjustments, as opposed to huge adjustments, which can look obvious and unnatural. So I tend to stick around a range of, say… never go over 50. Usually stick around half that, about 25. So minus 25, plus 25, either way. It just depends on your image and what you’re actually trying to achieve.
Now, from saturation, we also have the Luminance tab. Now, this allows you to adjust the brightness of a color itself, which essentially allows you to adjust the density. So what you can do is . . . Once again, if we wanted to adjust the red, we could actually darken the red off, which actually makes it look quite vivid just by darkening it off. It really does make it look more intense. Or you can lighten off a color. If I didn’t want the sky to be so dark, I could lighten it off. As you can see, it’s starting to clip there.
So it does give you the ultimate control. It sort of reminds me very similar to the selective color settings in Photoshop. It does give you… Although, you actually have saturation in this, where you don’t in the other one. So it does give you that extra control that just wasn’t originally in, say for example, the selective color in Photoshop.
Now, you have the option, when making your adjustments, to use all three tabs. So you could actually go through and walk through each if you wanted to. So you could make slight adjustments to the hues first, to get them to the exact sort of color that you’re after. You can go in and make an adjustment to the hue itself… saturation, sorry… and actually boost that. Then you could go in and make a slight adjustment to the luminance or brightness of that particular color.
So you could use it like that, where you’re actually using all three at once, just to adjust one particular color, just to get it right. Or in other cases, you may only need to adjust on one tab and one particular slider to end up with the desired results that you’re actually trying to achieve. So it does give you a creative potential that is sort of nearly unlimited. You can almost do anything that you wanted to your images with this particular panel. That’s why I find it so fascinating and so useful when I’m adjusting my photographs.
So it is worth spending time experimenting with the sliders and sort of getting to know or coming to terms with just how color is affected by adding and subtracting different hues to a particular color and also how color is affected by the intensity and also the brightness of a color. So by adding more density to a color, it tends to pop a bit more than if you were to lighten the color off, which tends to make it look less intense.
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