18/03/2018
I used to not really do much editing to my photos other than correcting white balance and bumping exposure, maybe adding a little contrast here and there, and bringing down the highlights. But to get the colors where you need them to be, sometimes you need to take things a step further. Enter, the HSL tab!
Back when I was a newer photographer, the HSL tab was kind of intimidating to me becauseI didn’t really know what it did. If you’re like I was and not entirely sure how to use it to edit your images, here’s a little breakdown of what the HSL tabs do.
HUE
Hue controls the actual color of a color. Slide the tab in one direction to make all of the greens look more yellow, slide it in another to make them look a bit more blue in hue. Make sense? To make your grass greener and less freakishly neon, you can drag the slider a bit to the blue side. I’ve also used the hue tab if a skin tone looks a bit too orange. We’ll talk about skin tones a bit more in a minute.
SATURATION
Saturation is basically the degree of intensity of a color. If you were to remove all saturation from an image, it would be colorless and essentially black and white. You can move the slider one way to get a much more intense, vibrant color, or the other way to tone it down a bit. For a fix for yellow grass, I’d bring down the saturation of the green tab so the green is not such a dominant color. If someone has an orange skin tone (maybe a bit too much spray tan?) you can bring town the saturation a touch. You have to be careful though because if you bring it down TOO much, the person’s skin will start to look orange.
LUMINANCE
I probably toy with luminance the most. Luminance is the actual darkness or lightness of a particular color. For the green grass, I’d bring the luminance up a bit so that the grass is lighter looking and less dark and dense. This is a great way to brighten up a portion of the image (like the grass) without bumping up the overall exposure of the image too much so that the rest is over exposed. Going back to potentially orange skin tones, I usually brighten the luminance on the orange slider when this happens because it will brighten the orange tones and make them