From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Changing color in Camera Raw

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Changing color in Camera Raw

- Hello, and welcome to another episode of "Photo Tools Weekly". In this week's episode we're gonna turn our attention to Adobe Camera Raw. Here we'll explore how we can use our HSL controls, and the Targeted Adjustment tool, in order to fine-tune and change color. All right, are you ready? Let's dive in. All right, for this project we'll start off by working with this photograph here, it's a picture of a sculpture, which is located next to the beach in the town where I live. Then we'll apply what we've learned here to working on a photograph. All right, well with this one we often start in Camera Raw in the Basic panel and make adjustments yet, the color controls that we have here are just too global. If we want to get specific, and modify one of these colors, we need to go over to our HSL controls. Now we have a few different ways to work with these controls. We have HSL stands for Hue, which changes the hue, or the color. Saturation is color intensity, and Luminance think of as brightness. Now we can either go to one of these tabs and simply drag this around if we want to change the characteristics of those reds, we could make a change like that there. If we go to Saturation, we could then remove color from certain areas and you can see how we can pull color out from different parts of the image. And here just clicking and dragging those sliders around. And by doing that we can then say, "Okay, hey, I want this color in, but everything else out." Last, but not least, we have Luminance, which gives us the ability to change the brightness or darkness of a specific area of the photograph. Now, with these sliders if ever you want to reset them, there's a really nice button there, Default. Just go through and you can restore all of those settings to their defaults. Or, if you just want to set a couple sliders back, just double-click the Slider tab, and that will then also go back to the default setting. Now, as I mentioned, we can use the sliders here, but we can also use a tool which is located up top. It's this one right here. It's called the Targeted Adjustment tool. Now when you have this tool active, whatever tab you're in, it will allow you to make changes there. So, for example, if I want to make changes to the hue, I'm in the Hue tab. Have that Targeted Adjustment tool selected, and I'm gonna click and drag to the left or to the right. And one thing that's interesting about the tool is you'll notice that it's actually moving two sliders at once. As I drag around, it's gonna say, "Well, what other colors are here?" So, if you need to have a little bit of a broader reach, you can modify this by using this tool. If you want to get a little bit more specific and say, "Hey, you know what? I only wanna work on the purples, not the blue of the background." You might use the slider. So it really depends upon what type of look or effect you want to accomplish. Now the other thing to keep in mind which is really cool about this tool is, you just activate it by clicking on it. Then you can go to a new tab and then you can start to work and here you can see, well, I'm removing colors from the image simply by clicking and dragging and I'm working on my Saturation levels here. And I'm doing that by modifying sliders, dragging over here, or clicking on screen. Next, we can go to Luminance, and then here again it's just a matter of clicking and dragging in order to customize that. All right, well, that's a quick primer on how we can work with HSL. Let's apply that to a photograph. Here we have a photograph of a friend, Kristin, and, let me zoom in on this image a little bit more so we can see it. What I want to do with this photograph is change the color of her dress and also the brightness there. I wanna make it blue. So, we'll go to our HSL controls. We want to go to Hue because that's the one for changing color. We select the Targeted Adjustment tool. Then we click on the area of the image we want to modify, and now we start to drag it. We're gonna drag it different directions so we can see how we can shift this around. What I want that to do is to go to the left there so that I get those nice blues. I also wanna experiment a little bit with my sliders so that I can fine-tune the way that that blue is going to appear. And then you may wanna shift some other colors in the image, too, as you're there. So you can experiment a little bit. But I think the blue is looking nice. Now for the Saturation, we can of course go there and use this tool and click and drag to increase or decrease the saturation. Luminance, we'll go to our luminance area and then we can brighten it up or darken it. And as I mentioned, I wanted to brighten that up there. All right, well, here we were able to make a really specific, focused color adjustment. We're able to do that using those HSL controls. You can see this is the before and now here's the after. And this all revolves around using the Targeted Adjustment tool, in the different areas, Hue, Saturation or Luminance. But also at the same time using our sliders. Noticing that the tool and the sliders work a little bit differently. And often, what I've found in my own work flow it's, using both together which allows you to fine-tune it exactly how you want it. All right, well that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thanks so much for joining me and I'll look forward to seeing you next time. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.

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