Adobe Camera RAW - using the HSL/Grayscale Tab

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HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminance) is a different way of looking at the colours and tones in our pictures from the more familiar RGB (Red, Green and Blue) model, separating the amount of colour and its brightness from the actual colour itself. Borrowed from the world of TV and video, it offers new and exciting ways to edit our work. - Geoff

Our first Photoshop CS3 camera RAW tutorial covered the fundamental image correction and editing tasks within the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) editing environment. We used the Basics panel to tweak white balance, improve specific areas of exposure and contrast, as well as making our images more crisp and vibrant when needed.

This tutorial will focus on some of the creative controls that ACR provides, allowing you to stylize your images without learning complex masking or colour channel techniques. The first thing is to click on the HSL / Grayscale panel button.

This will reveal a collection of three tabs, each with 8 slider controls. There is also a 'Convert to Grayscale' button, which we'll discuss later in the tutorial. The 'Default' button (that looks like hot-link text) resets your sliders per tab, undoing any changes made. Keep this in mind as it frees you to experiment without resetting all three sets of sliders, should you make a mistake.

The Hues tab

The first of our HSL tabs focuses on Hues (or regions of specific colour). Moving one of the eight hue sliders can (if the hue is present in your image) shift that specific colour region to a different but directly related hue. For example you might decide to make an area of green more yellow-green or more blue-green. Or, you may wish to make a region of orange more red-orange or more yellow-orange.

A key point to remember: with Hue sliders, you are changing the colour in question, not the colour’s purity (Saturation) or its brightness (Luminance), which is what we’ll talk about next.

To use the Hue sliders, all you need recognize is which colours among the sliders are present in your photograph. Experiment and see what happens! You will find that some sliders produce a very pronounced effect on your image, while others seem to have no effect at all. This is by design. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

First we’ll move the 'Reds' slider all the way left (-100), to see what happens. Note: -100 does not denote the removal red hues, but rather it applies the “opposite” red hue that would result from moving the slider all the way right (+100). In this case, a pink-red (left) vs. an orange-red (right).

However, because there are no red hues to speak of in this photo, moving the red slider has had no effect on the image at all! Next we’ll move the Blues slider to -100 and see what happens.

As you might expect, because there are large areas of blue ocean and sky in this photo, moving the 'Blues' slider creates an extremely pronounced effect. So much so that moving the slider to the full -100 value has created a very artificial look.

Finally, we can see that moving one or more sliders which correspond to smaller regions of similar colour (Greens and Yellows in this case), will have a smaller but visible effect as well. Compare the green areas just beyond the sand, to the same area in the example above....

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