Hey guys, Ryan here at Signature Edits and today we are going to take a deep
dive into the HSL panel inside of Lightroom. We're going to unpack how it works,
what it's all about, and how you can use it. Let's get into it!
Okay so what is the HSL panel you say? It is the hue saturation and luminance tool
inside of Lightroom, and so we're going to unpack exactly what that means, how to
use it, and then show you a few separate examples of how it can practically be
used to edit your photos. So to explain these terms we're going to look at a
little bit of color science. Don't worry we're going to keep it simple and quick.
...and everybody born after 1999 has no idea what that was about! Anyways, this is
the color spectrum of visible light. Now all light that your eyes see is
energy, and the amount of energy that that light has is the color of that
light. Why does this matter? Because hue is the dominant wavelength of your light,
so if you're looking at your light spectrum here and most of the energy
coming off of a source is in this 415 nanometers wavelength you're going to
see it and perceive it as blue. Okay now saturation: Color saturation is the
purity of that particular wavelength. So let me demonstrate that by looking at
this black panel here okay I'm going to go up into our tone curve and I'm going
to go into the red Channel so right now we're seeing black which is basically no
color at all whereas if we raise our red channel up here we're going to see we
have added 100% red to this image it's now completely red completely saturated
if I add in some green however you're going to see that the saturation of the
red starts drum now it's becoming yellow now if I go down to the blue and I add
in 100% blue you're going to see it becomes white so even though our red is
at a hundred percent because we also have a hundred percent green and 100
percent blue our image is white now if we take away these other colors you're
going to see that the saturation of the red is much deeper why is that because
the purity of the light that we're seeing is this one spectrum this one
wavelength we're no longer seeing a combination of red blue and green we are
only seeing red now if you want to have a breakdown of the tone curve tutorial
you can check out my earlier tutorial I'll put a link up in the card right in
the top right but to summarize saturation is the purity of your light
source we have one more measurement in our HSL panel before we're getting
started with at and that is luminance luminance is the
easiest to understand is simply light intensity how dark or bright the light
is so this quick diagram explains it our
initial light source is measured in lumens that goes down it reflects off
this tabletop at a given distance that is Lux and that reflects up into the eye
the amount of light that finally reaches the eye is known as luminance
technically the Candela per square meter Candela is I think a measurement of a
candles brightness that has nothing to do with anything but a quick fun fact is
lumens and Lux you might see if you're ever buying a video light or buying a
flash and it's showing you the brightness measurement lumens is the
amount of light that your initial source gives off whereas Lux is the amount of
light that hits a source at a given distance so always look for a Lux
measurement if possible because that distance is defined whereas lumens can
be measured anywhere within you know here here here here away from the source
so you don't truly know how bright a light is unless you have a Lux
measurement anyways let's move on to understanding our HSL panel with this
beautiful color we love truth and justice so here is the HSL panel over
here you can open it by hitting this little triangle here and we have our hue
our saturation and our luminance which now we know what those mean you might be
intimidated by everything else going on in here but don't worry we're going to
unlock that for you as well so let's start off by looking at how we navigate
around the HSL panel so to access the panel we hit this little triangle to
hide it we hit that triangle again and you'll see it says HSL slash color this
is not two different tools that you have to choose between it is simply a
different way of displaying the same information so in this format we can
choose between hue saturation and luminance with all the colors able to
select whereas when we select color we can do the same thing hue saturation and
luminance but only for individual colors at a time so it's kind of like a small
micro version of this entire HSL panel it just depends whatever you prefer
I personally use it in this mode and if you want to you can hit this all button
and be overwhelmed with a plethora of options at your fingertips and do
everything at the same time but to prevent scrolling issues where I have to
go up and down to adjust things I simply select hue saturation or luminance so
looking at that we are now going to see the practical implications of hue
remember we said it was the primary wavelength of whatever light we
were seeing so we can actually vary that primary wavelength within different
ranges of color so if I take my Reds and I make the wavelength closer to purple
you'll see that everything shifts over towards its purple counterpart over here
and now if we go the other way towards orange you'll see our Reds are turning
towards orange so that's how we can manipulate our colors inside of
Lightroom simply by adjusting our hue and moving it either to the color on its
left or color on its right within the color wheel now you can't take oranges
and make them blue for instance we are simply shifting them a finite amount and
if you want to actually make wild changes in your colors you should look
at our other tutorial here where I have changed anything the color of anything
in Lightroom you can check that out I'll put the card up in the top so that's how
Heuer our saturation remember we said it was the amount of purity within our
color well we can look at that take all the saturation away and you're going to
be left with most mostly gray that is a combination of all of our colors whereas
if we add red and saturation here we're going to see our color gets more pure
more saturated okay so we can do that and adjust our saturation now lastly
luminance is brightness we can adjust our brightnesses by lowering or
increasing the intensity of light and manipulate our photos that way so that
is how you use the panel let's jump over to some practical implications and show
you how to use it sweet deal okay photo exhibit numero uno
is this beautiful shot of a couple running in a dead dusty field and we
have a bright bright blown out sky well we can fix that by going to our
luminance section click that grab our blues and just drag that blue Channel
down you can see we can get all the color back in our blues simply by
dragging that value down and then normally when I'm using the HSL panel I
tend to want to make my changes subtle so first off I wouldn't go like this and
you can see I'm really pulling too much information back and actually that works
out you're gonna get some fringing and some weird-looking artifacts happening
here so I'm not going to go quite that intense maybe dial it back a little bit
and I like to take these surrounding colors and dial those back as well I
feel like that gives you a more subtle look by doing it that way now another
thing we can do is brighten up the skin because they are obviously in the
shadows we can take the oranges which is their primary skin tone as well as the
Reds and the yellows and take those up and just like that we have gone from our
before to after really rescued a ton of detail without having to do much another
thing that I would hop over and do is typically I find skin tones a little bit
too magenta so I go over to my heel and I'll grab my oranges and make them a
little bit less magenta magenta meaning reddish so we're going to grab those
drag those a little bit towards our green side perfect and you can see the
difference here we've got our original skin tones and after we've brighten them
up and lastly we can take some saturation out of the skin if we want I
think we've got some weird saturation happening up here on his forehead it's
looking a little bit too much another cool tool we have here is this little
spot selector so if we hit this spot selector we can actually go to our image
any point of the image we can select it and it will show us which color that
corresponds to so here we've got our blues we've got our oranges we've got
our blues again obviously there's a lot of blue and orange in this image and not
much else but I can grab the point on his forehead I want to desaturate and it
will grab those colors you can see it's a little bit of a magenta and mostly
Red's will bring the saturation down on that perfect and go up to our basic
panel maybe bring some vibrance up overall and that looks absolutely
perfect just kidding now this is just a
demonstration of how to use the tool not necessarily what I would do for my final
edit but you get the point we've gone from here to here rescued a
lot of detail taking them saturation out of the skin that is how easy it is okay
next example here we have a beautiful apple orchard and we've got a lot of
green going on and some reds let's see what we can do so if you want to get
really filmic green tones I found this is the magic you want to desaturate your
yellows and you want to desaturate your greens when you do that you'll see all
of a sudden they're popping off this image it looks so much more organic than
our original here and that's all I had to do now another thing I would do I
would take the luminance of their skin up so it just sort of pops a little bit
and I would take the saturation down it's particularly in the reds and again
I would take my hues because this was taken on a canon camera I find it tends
to be a little bit too magenta so take it somewhere around there so again
here's our original and here is after just using the HSL panel you can see our
power that is now if I wanted to I could also
maybe darken down the greens to play some more focus on them or I could
brighten the greens if I wanted to go that way now one last thing you can do
is you can play with the hue of your green so if we take it more towards blue
aqua whatever we can make our greens kind of that sort of sort of fairytale
vibe or we can take them towards yellow and more towards a earthy organic fall
sort of vibe depending on whichever you prefer so you have a lot of flexibility
creatively in what you do with the HSL panel so here's before and here's after
and here's maybe our alternate look
something like that okay let's bounce over to number two let
me show you again another example of the greens this is slightly different
because we have grass and that is the worst thing to deal with when you're
looking at editing photos that grass drives me nuts because it is not a
pretty shade of green it tends to be way to kind of yellowish in here
but watch what happens all we have to do is grab our grass grab the saturation
take it down in the yellows then grab the saturation take it down in the
greens wow look at that all of a sudden we have a more concentrated image so one
thing when it comes to editing your images you want to look at the tones
across the entire image and try and minimize if you can only have one or two
tones within that image it will be much more cohesive and strong as a whole so
you can see that we really only have a couple of tones going on here we mostly
now that we've removed the yellows and the greens we have blue and we have
orange those are our primary colors with a little bit of red in there so what we
can do is kind of take those colors and just bring them out a little bit more by
slightly exaggerating the saturation in our blues and maybe a little bit more in
the oranges great now we can go over to our hues and if we want to we can play
with these a little bit to bring out some tones that are a little more
pleasing I'm gonna take my yellows and you'll see that even though we've
desaturated the yellow there is still a little bit of a difference happening
here in the shadows so just watch for that how it just warms it up by adding
some kind of red to those yellows and we're going to do the same thing with
our greens see if we like that not noticing much of a difference either way
and if you wanted to you could even take your blues and make those more of a
crazy aqua if you want an exaggerated filter but I'm going to keep it pretty
natural here something like that and then finally we can head over to our
luminance panel and very slightly just bring our greens down and our yellows
down and you can see we've just added some contrast to the image just like
that so here's our original image and there is after making our HSL
adjustments no other changes none of these other tools used in Lightroom at
all just HSL took us from here all the way to here how awesome is that okay one
final example for you guys we're gonna look at this guy right here we're gonna
do something very similar to our first image with the sky we'll take our
luminance down to get the Blues back in that sky and do the same thing with the
kind of colors surrounding it immediately you'll see we've got a lot
of detail back then we're going to raise the luminance up on our yellows and our
R it's something like that we're gonna go over to our hues and this is where we
can get really crazy and creative if we want to and we could do like that kind
of teal and orange look just like that we could take our oranges and we could
saturate the goodness out of them but we'll keep it a little bit more subtle
here maybe add a little bit of saturation to our blues and that is
looking pretty good so here's the original image and just with the HSL
adjustments we have brought back the sky we've raised up the oranges and brought
out some pop in the colors that is how powerful this panel is we can take our
washed out images and we can bring new life into them just like that so I hope
this was helpful for you to see what is possible with the HSL panel if it was
please hit that like button for me don't forget to leave a comment below and
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will catch you in the next one take care
you