Using Hue & Saturation To Enhance Your Images

Posted on Monday, July 21, 2008:: 1062 Views

Chances are, you've fiddled around with the Hue & Saturation dialog in Photoshop at one point or another, most likely to colorize an image with a sepia-like tone or a faux-cyanotype, or to adjust the overall saturation of all the colors.  Maybe you haven't ever used this particular dialog, in which case, all those things I just mentioned? you can perform those edits inside this simple Photoshop dialog.

The dialog itself is fairly straightforward. Choose the color you want to saturate (or desaturate) from the Edit drop down. Master is the default and will affect all colors. Next, slide the saturation slider to the right to increase saturation or to the left to decrease saturaion. Pretty simply right?

The Hue slider will acually change the color whether its one color that you've targeted or all colors in the Master channel. Use it in conjunction with the colorize check box (bottom right) to achieve almost limitless monochromatic effects, or use it on a targeted color to alter the color temperature. For example, say you have some greenery (perhaps some ivy in the background?) that you want to make more aqua rather than warm and yellow. Make sure you're editing the greens and slide the hue slider to the right slightly. Keep in mind that this will effect all the greens in the image.

Now for the bars at the bottom of the dialog. The color bars at the bottom show your color before (the top color bar) and your color after (the bottom bar). The color inside the middle bracket (which shows up when you are targeting a specific color) is the main color that you will be affecting and the colors inside the outer brackets are used to feather your selection. You can resize any of the brackets to fine tune your selection and narrow down the color that you want to affect.

While adjusting the overall saturation of color in your images can yield some good results, spending a few more minutes selectively adjusting the saturation of specific colors can yield fantastic results. It's not that hard either. First, you select the color you're aiming to change from the Edit drop down menu at the top, then fine tune your selection with the eyedroppers. The first eyedropper will target the main color and the Hue/Saturation dialog will either create a new color (like Yellows 2 for example) or keep with the predefined color. The second eyedropper will expand your selection, adding similar colors while the third eyedropper will subtract from your selection. You can then adjust the brackets to add or subtract some of the surrounding colors.

In the example below I targeted three colors; yellow, green and magenta. For the yellows I made the end brackets very small so that I could isolate the yellow flowers without too much of the surrounding reds being affected. Then I sort of took some liberties and changed the hue to an orangish color. Next I edited the greens, adding more aqua and increasing the saturation. The greens, in my humble opinion, are much more vibrant in the after image (this is especially noticeable in the ivy above the address to the upper left of the door). Finally, I targeted a specific purple/magenta flower with the eyedropper and changed the hue to more of a blue color. Notice there are a few scattered dark blue flowers along the top of the wall. Rollover the words "Yellows", "Greens" and "Magentas" under the Hue & Saturation dialog to see my adjustments. The end result is subtle, but better. Of course, this kind of adjustment is very subjective.

Before
After

 

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 The last slider I'm going to talk about is the Lightness slider. It's function is basically to make your targeted color darker (closer to black) or lighter (closer to white). As you darken or lighten a color you'll need to adjust the saturation, adding more saturation as needed. Below is the edited image from above, but with darker greens for a different effect.

The lightness slider works well for skies too. In the example below I pumped up the saturation of the blues and darkened them up quite a bit for a more dramatic sky.

Before
After	Notice the before and after color bars at the bottom of the Hue & Saturation dialog (specifically in between the center brackets). The dark blue on the bottom clearly shows a drastic change has been made to the blues.

I have to admit I find tweaking the individual colors in Hue & Saturation to be rather fun. There's something satisfying about knowing that you really went in and made some creative adjustments to individual colors, versus just tweaking the master saturation slider to the right (although there's absolutely nothing wrong with that). The end result should ultimately be all that matters.

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