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One of the most important tools that you need to understand
to better edit and color grade your photos
is the HSL tool.
This tool allows you to manipulate the colors in your photo.
And the best part is that it's relatively simple,
but even if you think you already know the HSL tool,
Capture One has a few hidden gems in there
that I'm gonna teach you in this video.
So make sure to stick around,
to see if there's something you didn't already know,
secure the cup, and let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
First things first, HSL stands
for Hue, Saturation and Lightness.
Hue is basically a fancy way of saying color.
So if you're adjusting the hue, you are changing that color.
So for example,
if we wanted to take something that was blue in the photo
and make it more purple, we could adjust the hue to do that.
Saturation is the intensity of the color.
So if we increase the saturation,
we're going to see more of that color.
It's gonna be more vibrant.
If we decrease the saturation,
it's going to get more black and white
and lightness is how bright or dark things are
in your photo.
That one's pretty straightforward.
So the magic of the HSL panel in Capture One
is that we can adjust hue, saturation,
and lightness for specific colors within our photo.
To get to this tool,
we're going to go down to the Color Editor in our tools,
and then we're gonna go to the Basic tab.
If for some reason you don't have that tool visible,
you can right click anywhere on your tools,
hit Add Tool and go find Color Editor.
Inside this tool, we see eight different squares,
which for simplicity, I'm gonna call red, orange,
yellow, green, teal, blue, purple, and pink.
There's also a rainbow one that we're gonna talk about
in a little bit.
These colors are specific selections
along the color spectrum.
And it's important to know that this is a loop.
So if you were to keep going past pink,
you'd get back to red again,
and it would just keep going and keep going.
And that brings us to adjusting the hue.
So if we grab green,
anything that's green in the photo is going to be adjusted.
When we move the hue to the left,
it's gonna push it more towards yellow.
If we move it more to the right,
it's gonna push it more towards teal.
So using the hue slider,
we can take any of these eight colors and we can shift them
closer to their neighbor.
One thing that I like to do with my hue slider
is to make a photo feel a bit more glued together
is to kind of cluster the colors.
So I'll take yellow and I'll move it
over towards orange a little bit.
I'll take red and move it over towards orange a little bit.
Then I'll do the same thing with green over towards teal,
and then blue over towards teal.
I'll generally move my purple
over towards blue a little bit,
and then move my pink over towards red.
Now we can see a before and after of this photo,
this one little move can take the colors of a photo
and kind of make them feel a little bit more complimentary
within all of the colors.
Moving on to the saturation slider, it's basically the same.
You choose your color and then you can either add
or subtract saturation.
So selected on orange here.
I can either increase the saturation or I can decrease it
and notice that it doesn't affect any of the other colors
in the spectrum.
Similar to the hue shifting trick.
One thing that I like to do is de saturate
all of the colors except maybe one
or a pair of complimentary colors to make those stand out.
So for example, on this photo,
we could go through and pull down the saturation
on all the colors,
except for the ones that we really wanna stand out.
So like yellow, we'll leave a little bit in,
and I'll actually increase the orange
and a little bit of the red.
So, we've got before and after.
And that really makes that flower stand out in the middle.
And the third slider under each color is lightness.
And this can be really handy if you've got
like a back-lit shot
where your subject is a little bit dark,
especially if they're a color that will stand out
against everything else, you can go in,
increase the lightness and it'll just make them pop out
a little bit more.
Now, as I mentioned on the far right side
of all those colors, there's one option that looks
a bit like a rainbow or like the whole color spectrum
squished into one square.
This is basically an all button and it allows us
to change all of the colors at once.
So if I push the hue slider to the left,
we're literally shifting all of the colors
over to their neighbor.
If I push it to the right, it goes the other way.
And then we can also increase or decrease the saturation
of everything all at the same time.
In this case, the lightness slider is grayed out.
You can't use that because you've already got
an exposure slider somewhere else in the program.
So with this,
you could actually do my little de-saturation trick
by pulling down that saturation on all the colors
and then just increasing it on the ones
that you want to stand out.
So if we pull back all of them and then increase
the teal and the blue,
those little berries will pop out a little bit more.
Okay, now you remember how I said that in the HSL tool,
the colors were preselected for you?
Well, they don't actually have to be.
In Capture One, if we click this little three dot button
over on the right side of the color editor,
it's gonna pull up the Edit Color Ranges dialog box.
And here you can see the full color spectrum
and exactly what each of those different squares mean
closer to the bottom of the dialog box,
there's something called View Selected Color Range.
And what that allows you to do is it will actually isolate
in the photo that you have up,
whatever slice you're currently selected on.
So if I pick my green one,
I'm only seeing what it thinks of as green and blue
and red and orange and so on and so forth.
And then, we have the ability to actually adjust those
to what we want.
So if I choose this green here,
I can actually just grab this line and move it.
And as I move it in,
you'll see that some of the colors are being removed
from that selection.
Or I can add more if I go outwards.
Now, all of the selections that we have on each
of these slices actually overlap a little bit,
and there's a slider just below the color wheel
called smoothness that chooses how much they overlap.
It basically fades each color selection
into the one beside it
so that you don't get harsh artifacts
when you start to affect these different colors
in your photo.
Generally, I like to keep the smoothness pretty cranked up
so that I don't see those harsh artifacts.
Now, one other cool thing in Capture One,
if I start really messing with these slices
in what I'm choosing,
you'll see that it actually reflects down here
in the Color Editor tab.
So it'll show me a different color on that tool.
And if you messed with it a whole bunch
and you want it to go back to where it was,
you just click Reset to Default and hit Apply,
but let's say maybe you don't want to manually change
the color selections,
but you're not a hundred percent sure
what a specific color is in your photo.
Like, is it yellow or is it orange
or is it like somewhere in between?
There's actually a tool for that right down here
in the bottom, right corner of the color editor
called Direct Color Editor.
You can either click the little eyedropper tool,
or you can just hit D to select that.
And then anywhere that you click and drag on your photo,
it will affect the right color.
So if we click on this area kind of between yellow
and orange on the color spectrum, and we drag to the right,
you'll see that the hue is being affected of the yellow.
And it's got the orange highlighted too.
If we drag up and down, we can affect the saturation.
And if we hold Option or Alt
if you're on a PC and we drag left and right,
we can affect the lightness of that color,
but this is actually even more awesome
than it seems at first.
It's not just choosing one of the colors as you saw there,
it was choosing yellow and orange.
So if it's somewhere in the middle,
it'll actually figure out how much yellow
and how much orange and it'll adjust them accordingly.
So for example,
if I'm somewhere between the yellow and the orange here,
and I want to drag the hue to the right,
notice that it went by 15 on the hue scale of yellow,
but it only went 7.4 on orange.
What that means is that where I clicked on the photo
was actually more yellow than orange.
And so, it decided to affect the yellow
more than it did the orange.
And there's another button down
beside the Direct Color Editor that allows you to change
the settings of that tool.
So in here you can choose which direction you have to drag
or which shortcut you need to use
to do hue, saturation, and lightness.
And then you can also change the sensitivity
of how much is being affected while you're dragging.
And if you don't want to go over here and click this,
you can just right click anywhere
while you have the Direct Color Editor up.
And it'll bring up that panel right in front of your mouse.
So technically, you could do all of your HSL adjustments
without ever having your tools up at all.
You just hit D to pull up the Direct Color Editor tool,
and then you can drag around to adjust
the saturation of this and the hue of that
and the lightness of the other thing.
And bam, all your colors are different now in your photo,
let's put this all to the test by actually
doing a quick edit of the colors of a photo.
So looking at this photo here,
I probably want a little bit more saturation of the greens.
I probably want less saturation of the blues,
maybe to fix the pink on my nose.
So let's see what we can do.
If I go to the sky,
I hit D so I've got my Direct Color Editor,
and I'm gonna drag downwards to decrease the saturation.
I'm actually gonna drag it to the left a little bit too,
to make it a little bit more teal,
then I'm gonna go down to my trees.
I'm gonna increase the saturation of those.
Maybe make them a little bit more
towards kind of the yellow.
Right now, I've got a little bit of pink on my nose here.
It's probably under the red here.
So, I'm actually just gonna move that
over a little bit towards the orange.
Maybe I'll increase the saturation on orange a little bit.
I'm gonna go over to yellow and pull that
towards the orange as well.
Maybe bring up the lightness on the orange.
Not quite that much.
So there we go.
If we take a look at the before and the after,
all I did was messed around with the HSL
using the Direct Color Editor and then a little bit
on the sliders themselves.
So as you can see,
you can make a huge difference using the HSL tool,
AKA the basic color editor inside Capture One.
And technically, that's really just the beginning.
There's also the advanced color editor
and the skin tone tool,
which we're gonna go over in another video.
As always, I wanna hear from you,
are you already using the HSL tool?
Do you have any cool tricks that you'd like to do?
Make sure to leave a comment down below
and on your way down there,
hit that Like and Subscribe button,
hit the bell notification.
So you don't miss out on future videos.
Huge, thank you to Capture One for sponsoring this video.
Make sure to go down to the description
and start your free trial so you can mess around
with the HSL tool on your own.
Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)