hello I'm Robin Whalley welcome to lenscraft when DxO launch
PhotoLab 3 one of the improvements was to the HSL tool now I speak to a lot
of photographers and most of them seem to ignore the HSL tool this is a big
mistake and in this video I'm going to demonstrate why the image I'll be using
is one I shot recently on Formby Beach about thirty minutes after sunset the
Sun was over on the right of the frame and you can still see it as an after
glow over on the left side you can see the typical blue and pink colors that
you get in the blue hour the problem I have with this image is that the color
balance between the blue tones and the orange tones isn't quite right and isn't
how I'd like it fortunately the HSL tool is perfect for correcting this because
it allows me to pick these colors and manipulate them independently this is
much better than trying to use the camera profiles and the temperature
sliders which affect all the image colors think of it as being a precision
color adjustment tool the best approach is to first balance the colors and tones
in the image you're editing when you're satisfied with the overall color then
you can target individual colors with the HSL tool
the HSL tool has a range of predefined color channels you can adjust each
showing the color e-tax on there's also a white channel which affects the
overall image I can click and drag the handles on the outside of the color
wheel to change the overall hue of the image
I can also increase or reduce the overall image saturation with the
saturation slider for this image I'll start by reducing the saturation by
around 50 percent this is going to help me find the color channels that I need
to manipulate to achieve the overall look that I want with the saturation
reduced I can pick each of the color channels in turn and increase its
saturation this allows me to check the area of the image affected by that color
channel here for example I can see that the red Channel affects a large
proportion of the image but when I try this with the green Channel it doesn't
have any effect to reset the saturation slider back to zero double-click it
when you find a channel that affects a large portion of the image don't reset
the slider instead leave a small adjustment this cause is a white dot to
appear below the channel to help you remember which ones to work with later
after checking all the channels got back to the white channel and reset the
saturation slider we now have four color channels we can work with to adjust this
image I'm going to work from left to right starting with the red Channel I'll
add a small saturation increase to help me see the effect of the hue justement
now I need to decide if I'm going to shift the colors towards either orange
or pink for this example I think a small shift towards pink works best when I'm
happy I can reduce the saturation slider to something more appropriate
next is the turn of the yellow Channel and I'll use the same approach as I did
with the red I'll start by increasing the saturation
I'm happy with the hue for this channel correct the saturation
no to the violet channel and they'll use the same approach here I'm going to
shift the violet colors in the image more towards blue
finally I'll check the pink Channel and I'm going to move them towards blue with
this channel though I'm also going to adjust the color range using the handles
on each side these define the range of colors for that channel that I'm
affecting I really want this adjustment to affect some of the Blues in the image
as well
I've now finished adjusting the balance between all the main colors in the image
using the hue adjustment the next step is to look at balancing the saturation
between each of the colors by looking at the overall image when you do this you
may find one of the colors is too saturated in comparison to the others if
you do pick that color channel and reduce or increase the saturation
accordingly
finally look at the image to see if you need to adjust the overall saturation
using the white channel
if we check the results against the unadjusted image we see a big
improvement the change is made with the HSL tool allow us to better distinguish
between the blues and reds in the image and these colors now appear much
stronger all the adjustments are subtle but together they've had a big impact I
hope you found this video useful and if you have any other requests for PhotoLab
videos let me know in the comments below I'm Robin Whalley
you've been watching Lenscraft I'll see you next week for another video