Adobe Camera RAW Adjustment Tutorial - HSL (Hue-Saturation-Luminance) Tab
Posted by Wilk | Filed under Adobe Camera RAW tutes
This tab is the most amazing part of Adobe Camera RAW (and one of the strongest parts of Lightroom as well). This set of 3 sub tabs offer the ability to tweak color and saturation like never before. Especially because Adobe saw fit to add arbitrary colors in between the primary ones, this interface gives you an amazing amount of choices, control and options in tweaking your photo to brighten it up (as in the case of adding darkness and saturation to a blue sky) or tone it down (as the case may be for very strong tungsten lighting for example).
Hue: I find myself using this tab the least. It’s primary purpose as I see it is for either color correction or shifting colors on purpose. Just as a note, it is probably better to do most of your true color correction in Photoshop, because once you start shifting colors here, keep in mind that this is just a first step. While you can pull in any JPEG or RAW file back into ACR and start right from the settings you’ve already done,, doing so negates all the subsequent work you’ve done in photoshop. That is something to always keep in mind when you’re tweaking in ARC because you can’t bring a photo you’ve worked in photoshop without saving THAT as a JPEG, thus loosing all the layers etc. you’ve already done. I consider ACR as a "get it close" not "get it perfect" step in the post processing workflow.
The way the Hue sliders work is they take every color you see in the sliders and shift that color towards the color above (sliding to the left) or the color directly below it (sliding to the right).
This is one spot where it’s always a good idea to check "before and after" by using the preview checkbox in ACR.
It’s certainly worth your time to explore the Hue sliders, especially on a photo with difficult colors, and I do use it for very scuttle color shifts in certain photos, but as I said, I do the bulk of my color correction in Photoshop; 1. because it’s better suited for doing color corrections and has a lot of different ways to accomplish it and 2. because those color corrections can be done in nondestructive adjustment layers and can always be revisited and readjusted later on, and those adjustments are made to the final working copy as opposed to an intermediate step.
The Saturation tab is about as useful for tweaking a photograph as anything in ACR or Photoshop for that matter. Imagine being able to tweak color ranges to make them stand out more, be more vibrant and with other colors, make them subtle, even black and white if you like! That is part of the inherent power of the Saturation tab. As an example, you can heavily saturate the blues and aquas for adding a ton of punch to a blue sky, and tone down a fiery red shirt at the same time simply by pushing the blue and aqua sliders to the right—increasing saturation (in most standard sky shots you really only need to use the blue slider) and move the red slider to the left decreasing saturation in the red colors.
There are a whole host of possibilities this dialog box brings to your photography. I would challenge you as you use Adobe Camera RAW to be looking at the photograph in far more specific ways where color is concerned. With this dialog, especially coupled with the luminosity tab, there is a whole host of things you can do to add color or take color away with very specific focus.
You do want to be careful with these sliders and inspect the photo very carefully in terms of the elements of the photo you’re affecting, in particular if you get heavy with moving the sliders close to the edge. You can get unexpected results by going too far with adjustments and may find that out after lengthy editing in photoshop, so a once over at 100% pixel view of the entire photo is in order, and make sure the clipping indicators are on when you do so. Adding a lot of saturation to colors that are already nearly clipping will cause them to clip quite a bit. I always start with the "easy does it" rule by only going no more than 1/3rd of the way in either direction before I decide to take it further.
The Luminance tab is every single bit as amazing and effective as the saturation sliders, but in a different way.
While the saturation tab adds saturation, which can be considered punch, or a brightening of the colors, luminance is completely different from saturation. It takes the color of choice in the sliders and (for lack of a simpler way of explaining it) adds white or lightens color when you slide it to the right and adds black or darkens color when you slide a respective color slider to the left.
Let’s take the blue sky scenario from the saturation explanation. You’ve saturated the blue pretty heavily and the blue is brilliant. Perhaps you want to now darken that blue to take it from the surreal blue color saturation often brings to a deeply saturate darker blue by sliding the blue slider to the left, thus darkening the blue sky. This can easily be used as adding a faux polarizer effect.
It certainly doesn’t end there either, another thing you can do with these sliders is decrease or eliminate color clipping in a specific color, whether you introduced it into the photo with the saturation slider or it was inherent in the photo to begin with. Color clipping can usually be dealt with by darkening the photo overall or by darkening that specific color with the luminance tab.
All three of these tabs combined obviously give a whole new set of tools and amazing power in post processing to bring punch and bring out or subdue color aspects of your photograph in a way that could not be done before, or at least would take a significant amount of effort to replicate in Photoshop.
Convert to Gray Scale
This is the aspect of this set of tabs that I do not cover in the video. I’m certainly not about withholding information about what ACR can do, it’s just that with the new Black and White Layer Adjustment in Photoshop starting with CS3, to me, it makes more sense to convert to black and white using that tool. You still get amazing control over making given colors darker or lighter as expressed in black and white, the big difference being when you make these adjustments in Photoshop with an adjustment layer, you can come back a week or a year later and tweak those adjustments to change them to your liking.
Anything done in Adobe Camera RAW, while nondestructive are not the final step, not the final file. Any adjustments I can accomplish well in photoshop. Having said that, there is one variable that is open to those who use Bridge to batch out photographs. If all I was going to do is adjust photos in ACR and convert them to JPEG in a batch process, and some of them needed to be black and white, this method is absolutely perfect for that. One of the true bonuses of ACR is, you don’t have to open a photo in Photoshop ever to do what you need to do on a practice level. For full post processing, you can’t beat the power of Photoshop, but if you’re just doing say an initial batch-out for a client, you’ll likely bring the photos into photoshop after the final picks have been made, but for a quick batch capable process, keeping the whole thing in Adobe Camera RAW and bridge is a near perfect solution for that.
Based on that powerful capability, it makes perfect sense to convert to black and white using this interface. However, if you’re going to pull the photo into Photoshop to work it further, I strongly recommend converting the photo to black and white there, because you have a nondestructive adjustment layer that will do the exact same adjustments the above dialog box, but in a way you can revisit the photo and change settings. My mantra of nondestructive editing means nothing if you have to do work over, and that’s why I tend to coach on the differences in processes, so you can make clear choices what is better for your workflow.
The above dialog box is pretty self explanatory. The sliders work on the individual underlying colors as expressed in black and white, and the choices are to take each of the individual underlying colors and make them a darker shade of gray or a lighter shade. Because you have the big preview screen right there, it’s easy enough to tweak a photo to taste just by playing around. Even if you’re a newbie, this one is pretty easy.
Tags: adobe camera raw, nondestructive, post processing
