- Applying "Looks" Using Creative Profiles
- Virtual Copies- The "No Risk" Way to Experiment
- Using Presets for One-Click Looks
- Creating Your Own Presets
- Creating Presets That Automatically Adapt to Your Image's ISO
- Other Places to Apply Presets
- Changing Individual Colors
- How to Add Edge Darkening (Vignette) Effects
- The "Gritty City" Look
- Creating a Matte Look
- Making Great Duotones
- Creating Black- and-White Images
- Sun Flare Effect
- Painting Beams of Light
- Making Streets Look Wet
- Quick and Easy Spotlight Effect
- Adding a Light to the Background
- Getting the "Orange and Teal" Look
- Creating Panoramas
- Creating HDR Images
- Creating HDR Panos
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Changing Individual Colors
Anytime you have just one color you want to adjust in an image (for example, let’s say you want all the reds to be redder, or the blue in the sky to be bluer, or you want to change a color altogether), one place to do that would be in the HSL panel (HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, Luminance). This panel is incredible handy (I use it fairly often) and luckily, because it has a TAT (Targeted Adjustment tool), using it is really easy. Here’s how this works:
Step One:
When you want to adjust an area of color, scroll down to the HSL panel in the right side panels. That HSL acronym corresponds to the three tabs you see across the top of the panel: Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. Those aren’t just words; those are clickable tabs, and you can adjust each of those attributes separately, which is what we’re going to do here (well, in the next step anyway). The Hue panel lets you change an existing color to a different hue by using the sliders, and if you understand which combination of sliders make up the exact color you want to adjust, you can just click-and-drag those sliders. However, for the rest of us, we’ll need a little help, and luckily, it’s there waiting for us.
)
Step Two:
Our color helper is the Targeted Adjustment Tool (or TAT, for short), which makes these color adjustments super-easy. First, make sure the Hue tab is selected at the top of the panel, then click on the TAT (it’s that little round target, circled here in red, near the top left of the panel). Here’s how it works: Let’s say we want to change the Hue of the door. Click-and-hold the TAT on the door and drag up or down and it knows exactly which sliders correspond to the area where you clicked and it moves only those sliders as you drag up or down (as shown here, where I clicked on the door and dragged downward to change the hue from purple to blue). As I dragged, it moved the Blue and Purple sliders to the left to the right amounts (as seen here).
)
Step Three:
Okay, so the Hue tab is where we go to change our hue. Now, click the Saturation tab, and you’ll notice the sliders are all reset to zero. That’s because these sliders are just for adjusting saturation (if you click back on the Hue tab, your previous changes will still be in place). Saturation controls how vivid our colors are, so now that you’re in the Saturation panel, click-and-drag downward on the door, and you’ll see it desaturates the door’s colors (as shown here—compare this door to the one in Step Two). If you drag upward instead, it will make that blue door a more vibrant blue, and the farther up you drag and the more it moves those sliders for you, the more vibrant that door will become. Okay, that’s the “H” and “S” of HSL. One more to go.
)
Step Four:
Click on the Luminance tab at the top of the panel and a new set of eight color sliders appears all zeroed out. Luminance controls the brightness of a color, so let’s use it on the wall. Take the TAT and click-and-drag straight downward on the wall, and as you can see here, its color gets much darker (the luminance for both Orange and Yellow has decreased). Two last things: Clicking the All tab displays all three panels in one long, scrolling, vertical list. If you click on Color in the panel header, it switches to the Color panel, which breaks the colors all into sets with three sliders (HSL) for each color. But, regardless of which layout you choose, they all work the same way.
)