A New Tool For Color Adjustment in Camera RAW
by David Saffir
This is one of the better tools developed by Adobe. Tucked away in the Camera RAW dialogue box is what Adobe calls the HSL/Grayscale tool. It provides hue, saturation, and color luminance sliders.
The color luminance tool provides adjustments to the brightness or darkness of different color ranges - red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta. The red outlines on the illustration below indicate where you can find these tools.
The image below has been adjusted - I did a bit of cut and paste to show before and after - the
image half on the left shows “before”, and the right half shows “after”. Note the significant improvement in the sky from adjusting the blues, and the increased range of perceived contrast in the low hills on the right. The blue circles show the adjustments - moving the slider to the left decreases luminance of a color, and moving to the right increases luminance of a color.
I have used this tool many times to fix landscape images that are a little flat. The color luminance adjustment can help improve the dimensionality and realism of your images. You’ll find that different combinations of adjustments create changes in the details and the overall look and feel of your image.
Here’s a tip for landscape shooters - adjusting the green areas in an image may benefit from using the green and the yelllow adjustments - give it a try.
Two things to keep in mind: first, keep an eye on the histogram and make sure that your adjustments don’t go too far and cause clipping (loss of image detail); second, using these tools is more art than science, so experiment, experiment, experiment!
