How To Use HSL Color Panel In Lightroom CC

In this video, learn how to use the HSL / Color panel in Adobe Lightroom CC.
If you are just starting out with lightroom this tutorial is for you. Learn to use hue, saturation, and luminance in both the HSL and Color panels. See how easy it is to use the HSL adjustment tool.

So have you ever thought about using the HSL color panel in Adobe Lightroom CC and just didn’t know where to start? I’m gonna show you how easy it is to work with the HSL color panel. Let’s get into it. Hey, everybody, this is Charles Cabrera helping you get started with Photoshop, Lightroom, and photography tips. If this is your first time in the channel and you like short and easy tutorials, please consider subscribing, and hit that bell notification so you don’t miss anything. I’m gonna put links in the description to the practice images in case you wanna follow along.

What is HSL?

So here we are in the Lightroom Development Module. We’re going to go over to this triangle and click, and we see Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. So we’re gonna explain what that is. And we’re gonna use this example of all this green here in this park. So if I click on hue, get the green slider and take it to the right and go to the left, you can see that the colors are shifting within green. So that is your hue. If I click on saturation, go to this screen slider and increase the saturation going to the right here, green is getting stronger. Go the other way, the green is getting weaker. That is what saturation is. It is the strength of your color. Luminance; use that same green, go to the right. You see the green is getting lighter. Go the other direction, green is getting darker. So luminance is the brightness of color.

HSL Panel Adjustments

So now that we know what HSL is, we’re going to go back and talk about the HSL and color panels. What they do and how you can use them. Let’s look at the HSL panel and all the controls we have available. First of all, the layout, you saw this before, the hue, saturation and luminance, all the adjustments are right here for you. But if you wanna see all of them at once, you can click on the all. And this gives you your separate hue, saturation and luminance adjustments all in one panel like this. So I think I kind of like to use it when it’s collapsed so that you don’t see all this because there might be a scrolling issue or it could just be kind of overwhelming to see all this. Let’s go to luminance because what we wanna do first is find out what colors are actually in here. And so this is a way, if you’ve never used this tool or you’re trying to figure out which way to start, you don’t know exactly what colors are here in the panel. So what you could do is click on the luminance and just kind of play with the sliders. Going back and forth, you can see what is affected, and there’s a little bit of red in here. There’s a lot of orange. And there is a lot of yellow. So that’s just telling me what I can actually go back and change. So now I know what colors are here. And I can go all the way down just to test it out. Because if I’m not sure, this is one way to tell. To get these sliders that I’ve just been messing with to go back to zero, just double click on the color name and that will reset them all. So now that we know what colors that are here and we can change, let’s go back to hue and so let’s change the red a little bit, shift it over. And there was orange. So we can change that orange anyway we like it. I’m gonna put that there. Change the yellow, shift the green a little bit maybe. And we don’t want the blue to go that way. And then we go back to saturation for each one of those. I’m just gonna give it more blue, deeper blue, stronger blue. And you go down each of the colors and decide what you like. This is saturation now, so we’re giving these colors that we shifted a little bit more strength. Then you would go to luminance and you can make that color brighter, darker, whatever you see fit. And just keep on going down the panel with the colors that you want to change. And this is purely to taste. Ooh, you’re really giving that sky some deep blueness. So that’s how to basically discover what colors you might want to change. You know, if you’re really good at identifying colors you can go right to it and change that slider. So this might be a good time to bring this up. If you go through all that hard work to get this photo the way you like it. And say you took 50 pictures in the same area, what you can do is you can basically save all these adjustments that we just did right here in the HSL panel, you come over here to presets, say create preset. And under here you see it’s got some things checked by default. One of them that you were really working with is the color adjustments. And so you see that all of these adjustments here were checked, that means they’re going to be saved as a preset, say Canyon, is the name of it. Say create, and over here on the preset panel on the left, there is something called Canyon. What I’m going to do is come back to history and come all the way back before any of these changes were made. Come up here to my preset that I called Canyon, click on it, and so what I’ve done is I’ve brought back everything that I had before.

Color Panel

So we just looked at the HSL panel. Let’s look at color now. This could be a little bit easier, I think it’s easier with this panel but you decide. So here we can choose a particular color, like for instance, red. And use these sliders again to find out where the red’s at. Okay, I see some red there. And I’m going to change the hue a little bit, up the saturation. And you can go down each of these colors. Yeah, orange. Click on the orange and that’s a big change over there on the right. You can make it look how you want. Yellows. You can make this really look like a Fall scene. But you go through each of your colors. And the thing about this is that there’s probably more control with the HSL panels. But this one here kind of gives you a, I would say a little bit narrower viewpoint or a way to get to your colors, ’cause you’re choosing a particular color that you want to adjust. I’m gonna give this some blues here. Can’t do too much with the sky here. But there we go. The other thing about this panel is I could’ve said all, and looked at all of these separate colors. You can see that they’re all here, red, orange, yellow, all the way down. And I could’ve adjusted it like that. So this is a preference. Maybe you don’t wanna see all those colors at once. So I just went to each one and adjusted. So I think this is another good way. It may be easier. You choose, you decide. Here what you can do is, this little button here on the top of the HSL color panel, you click that. And there is your before. And there is your after. When you’re adjusting any of the sliders you could come over here to your keyboard and use the left and right arrow to basically make small adjustments. So you’ve seen me use the slider but you can use right and left arrow to make more finer adjustments. So again I can make a preset out of this.

HSL Adjustment Tool

So let’s move on to another example. And I think it gets even easier. So let’s see how that works. Okay, let’s go back to the HSL panel because it gets easier. And one of the features here is this adjustment tool right here. For instance this wall right here. If you hover over it, you can see the orange is highlighted. And so it kind of tells you what color’s affected. I’m hovering over green right now, it’s telling me. That bicycle seat, it says it’s blue. Or there’s a cover on that bicycle seat. The other seat’s got, looks like aqua that’s covering that seat. So you can go through an image and you could see what colors are being affected. Here it says there’s orange. Another great thing is once you… Once you click on that tool and you see the cross hairs, you can drag up. So for instance right now I’m on hue, if I drag up, you can see there’s actually two sliders that are changing. The orange and a little bit of yellow. So it’ll make an adjustment to however many colors are affected when you put that adjustment tool on, like say, this wall. So I’m going the other way. And see I’m changing those colors on the whole image but it’s telling me what color to change. So I can do that with all the sliders, or right now I can go to saturation, drag up and give those colors more saturation. I can do the same with luminance. Whether I want it a brighter yellow. And I can keep going. So even this… You know, this is obviously some green in this tree. So, if I go to hue and it says it’s green and a little bit of yellow, so I can shift that, I can make that plant look like it needs water. And I could do the same thing. So as long as you drag it in the same spot for each of these adjustments. So now I’m adding more saturation. I’ll go over to luminance, I can make it lighter. But I can go through this whole image. I go back to hue, do something with this wall. So it says there’s orange and a little bit of red in it. So I can shift this color a little bit. Maybe I think it’s too saturated, I can bring that down a little bit. Click on the luminance, drag in that same area, and make it brighter. And I can keep going through this whole photo and change anything I want. But you get the idea here. So it’s easier to identify your colors. And again you can click on this button up here to the before and after. Also if you wanna get a finer adjustment on any of these that was changed, say the orange I wanna. If I click on that and use my up and down arrows, I can change my adjustment by even finer amounts. So that’s working with this adjustment tool right here.

HSL for Black and White

So in this next example, you can use the HSL panel for black and white. And with the HSL panel it’s not really obvious where the black and white is. So what you need to do is come up here to the basic panel, click on black and white. As you can see the HSL panel has actually gone and it has changed to black and white. So clicking on that you have all these available here, it is best to kind of experiment here. You can use your sliders to give yourself whatever look you possibly want. This adjustment tool is available here, too. So if you wanna click on that and drag up, you can see here it’s affecting the reds, and just drag it over the black and white image and you can just get different effects. And again, same thing if you hover over different areas it is showing you what is actually there, so here it’s purple. But that’s how you would get to a black and white adjustment using a similar panel with HSL.