From the course: Mastering Adobe Camera Raw

Adjusting hue

From the course: Mastering Adobe Camera Raw

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Adjusting hue

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- The HSL controls for hue, saturation and luminance are really a secret weapon. They allow you to make targeted additional adjustments to those particular areas based on actual image details, and while there are several sliders, there's a more interactive tool that makes this much simpler. Let's start with our first photo here and come down to the color mixing controls. Here you'll see HSL, hue, saturation, luminosity. You can also choose color if you just want to go the other direction targeting a color with a single slider I find this is often quite useful. For example, let's choose the green value here and adjust. There's not a lot of green in this photo but it's still useful for this floor zone. If I click on reds, however, these are quite strong and notice how we can target that area. Brightening up the red, as well as maybe toning down the saturation and gently rolling the hue and you see that overall transformation. Remember, double clicking a slider will reset it. You can also see all of these all at once if you want to open them up and view them as a group. For example, maybe I just want to darken the blues a little bit. Look at how that affects the blue areas where there's blue light. You can literally see me lifting the sunlight type light up here and really popping that highlight nicely maybe boosting the color or pulling down the splash of color that was really putting the blue cast in there. Look at the metal surface here. As we adjust the saturation in that blue zone look at how it adds a blue highlight or can really pull the color out altogether. That allows for artistic manipulation of these changes which is really quite useful. I really find this tool very, very powerful. In this case, we're choosing to work in color mode. This lets us pick the color and then manipulate the HSL. Additionally, the HSL view can be useful too. This instead shows you the different sliders allowing you to work with them as a group. For example, let's look at the areas with yellow light and lighten or darken those, and you see almost a golden light there being affected across the surface. Very, very powerful. Let's switch on over here to the waterfall image and let's stick with just the hue for a moment. You've seen the tools working together but now we're just going to work with just the hue information. So with the HSL model, I'm going to look at the different colors and I feel that we can move these, look at as we add gold into the greens it looks like fall or make the greens greener. Looks really lush. These are quite nice. But I find that often the on image tool is more useful. This way you can click because maybe this particular shade of green is actually a combo of aqua and green. Notice how both sliders are moving a bit so we can more accurately refine that. Click on the rocks and that's more of this green slider here. Come on over down a little lower and click and that's being controlled more by the blue slider so that could be quite useful as you want to target particular color cast and you get a great interactive preview showing you golder or greener as you drag. By targeting just those hues, you can literally work with the image here live and get a very precise idea of what's happening. This is tremendously useful. As you work, put more blue into the rocks or neutralize that green by rolling a little bit more magenta or pink into them so that they don't have such a green cast. All in all, this tool is really useful and that's the targeted adjustment tool here that lets you click and interact within the image itself.

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