- [Instructor] HSL, or color adjustments,
provide a powerful way to selectively adjust the tones
or colors in an image
based on the colors contained in the image.
Editing with HSL color adjustments takes your skill level
to an advanced level of control in image editing.
So far, we've just explored the global image edits.
I always like to start my editing workflow
with basic global edits
and then fine-tune with selective edits like HSL color.
I've already selected the Chapter_7_07_02 folder
while in the Library module,
and now I'm in the Develop module
with the HSL color panel open.
HSL stands for hue, saturation, and luminance,
and right now we're viewing the Hue panel
with the hue sliders.
Before we get into this, I want to take a little tour
around this panel because it's really interesting
how there's all the same content just organized differently.
So if I click on Saturation,
we'll see the saturation sliders
but if I come over here to All,
we'll see the Hue, Saturation, Luminance all listed.
I think that's too much to be looking at at one time,
so I usually just leave it on one of these at a time.
If you click on Color,
it's all of the same information as HSL.
So I'll click on Color,
and here we get hue, saturation and luminous sliders
per color.
So it's just organized differently.
If I click on a color bubble up here,
we can look at the hue, saturation, and luminance
for that specific color.
If I click on the color wheel,
we see every single color listed here with the HSL sliders.
So I'm going to go back to the default setting
'cause that's my favorite.
By clicking on HSL,
it returns us back to the default way of looking at this
and then take a look at how these work.
The hue adjustments will adjust the color of the color.
It'll adjust that color on the color wheel.
So if we take the yellows, for example,
and move the yellow slider to the right,
the yellows in the image become green,
and if we move the yellow to the left,
the yellow become orange,
so you can get kind of a special effect with this.
I'll go ahead and double-click on it
to reset it back to the middle.
I don't use the hue sliders too often,
really just for special effects like this.
Let's take a look at saturation.
These sliders really tell us a lot.
If we look close, there's no color on the left side
and there's color on the right.
So if we move one of these sliders to the left...
we'll take the green one...
if I move it to the left,
we take all of the color out of the greens.
If I move it to the right, the green becomes more saturated.
We could do a kind of nice special effect here
by taking all of the color out and leaving one color behind.
So I'll take all the color from the image
and leave the red color behind,
maybe even saturate the red colors a little bit.
So you can get a special effect by playing around with that.
To reset all of these sliders back,
we'll double-click on the word Saturation here
at the top of the panel.
Let's jump over to Luminance and see what that does.
The luminance one is really powerful.
This allows you to selectively adjust the tones in an image
based on the color.
Notice the sliders here are brighter on the right
and darker on the left.
Instead of moving the slider for this one,
let's pick up the target adjustment tool by clicking on it.
This loaded it into the cursor,
and now we can click on a specific color to target it.
I like to use this on landscape images
to darken down the blues in the sky.
So I'll click on this light blue color and drag down.
And notice that both the aqua and the blue slider moved,
because it's recognizing that both of those colors
are in that area that I clicked on.
If I click on the orange color here and move it up,
it's moving the red and the orange to a brighter color,
and if I move it down,
it's moving both the red and the orange sliders
to a darker color.
HSL is an effective and easy-to-use tool
once you understand how it works.
I love it so much that I use some amount of it
on practically every image I edit.
It's a powerful way to add drama
or draw attention to a subject
without the need for complicated masking techniques.