(dramatic music)
- Hi, and welcome.
My name's Julieanne Kost
and on today's episode of The Complete Picture,
we're gonna take a look at how you
can make some selective color adjustments using Lightroom.
Now, I think we probably all know
that you can make more global adjustments
using things like the Temperature or the Tint sliders
and certainly in the Basic panel we can come down
under presence and change Vibrance and Saturation
but that's gonna change all of
the colors in the image at one time.
So if we wanna have a little bit more control
we need to take a look at the Hue, Saturation,
and Luminance area of Lightroom.
Now, let's just start with the Saturation.
If I simply wanted to de-saturate this entire image
I could use, for example, the V key
if I wanted to go all the way to black and white.
But I actually want to leave the image in color
'cause that's gonna enable me to do a few more things.
So I'll just take down the saturation
by clicking here on each one of the color sliders.
So, obviously if I did this often
what I'd wanna do is I'd wanna go ahead
and create a preset for that and, in fact,
there's a preset that you can download
from my blog if you want to,
that simply de-saturates everything.
But it's really easy, you would just set all
of the sliders up if you wanna create your own
and then click on the plus icon
and save out the saturation color adjustments right here.
And save that as your preset.
Alright, so that's one way to de-saturate an image
but obviously because I can go into
each one of these color ranges I have a lot more control.
So say, for example, I might not want to have
this top red area as de-saturated as it is right now.
Well, if we grab the targeted adjustment tool
by clicking on it and then click
in that color that we want to manipulate,
if we drag up it would increase the saturation
and if we click and drag down, it decreases the saturation.
So it might be a little confusing because when you click,
Lightroom hides the cursor but I'm actually clicking
and dragging up and you can see
the sliders going to the right.
If I click and drag down the sliders move to the left.
And you'll also notice that it's not just the red slider
that's moving because where I clicked in this image
that color is made up of both red and orange
so Lightroom goes ahead and moves both
the red and orange slider in the correct relationship
to how much color is underneath the point where I clicked.
So we can go ahead and do that for this blue area, as well.
Again, clicking and dragging up would add saturation,
click and drag down to decrease the saturation.
So it's kind of an easy way to balance things out.
Then I could also go under the Hue, for example,
if I wanted to change the color.
Maybe I don't quite like that blue so, again,
clicking and dragging up in that area will shift
the blues and in this case a little bit of the aqua
more towards the purple colors.
Clicking and dragging down would
bring them back towards the aqua.
So, again, all I'm trying to do is just get
two colors that match a little bit better here.
Alright, now you might also wanna take this one step further
and go and select your adjustment brush.
Because I do have a lot of blue that's reflecting
up here in this giant container.
And so what I'll do is I'll grab my adjustment brush
and just bring down the saturation here.
And we can go ahead and bring it down
to -100 and now you can see when I paint in here
I can selectively change the color here
because I'm just painting out 100%.
If you tap the A key, that would give you the auto-mask
right down here, that toggles it on.
So we don't have to be quite as careful
where I paint because Lightroom's gonna see the line
between this container here and the little building
and it won't jump over to de-saturate that orange color.
Alright, let's move to the next image for one moment
'cause I also wanna show maybe
a little bit of a different use of this.
Now I will start here with the Basic panel
because I do want to change the overall color balance.
So, again, that's a global change so in that case,
I would go ahead and use my Temperature or my Tint slider.
I just want that background a little bit more blue.
Now, what if we wanted to match the bicycle with the door?
Well, then I need to scoot down again to HSL.
And, by the way, HSL and Color, these two options...
The functionality is almost identical.
Let me just show you the difference.
The main difference is that HSL,
the Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity area
that has the targeted adjustment tool which
I use all the time instead of trying to guess
what color this is, you know, is it more orange
or does it have more yellow or red in it?
I'll use the targeted adjustment
tool to make my adjustments.
If we scoot over to the Color area,
we don't have that targeted adjustment tool.
And the reason that we have them both though
is they're just a different way of accessing color.
See, when I'm in HSL I've got Hue, Saturation,
and Luminosity so I can click on any of these
and then I get all of the different color ranges.
When we scoot over to color, basically I can click
on any color and then quickly access
Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity.
So it's just a different way of laying it out.
If you click on HSL and then you actually click on All
we can see HSL, Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity
for each color range so that might be an option as well.
When I'm on a smaller monitor though,
I like to pick just Hue, Saturation or Luminosity.
Okay, so if I want to make the bike
and the door the same color, again,
I'll pick up my targeted adjustment tool
and I'll be sure that I've got my option here set to Hue
and then you can click and drag on that orange
and you'll notice that by clicking and dragging up,
I'm shifting those reds and oranges
more towards the yellow hues.
Now that's a little bit too far so I'm gonna back off.
I'm also going to de-saturate that a little.
So I'll click and just drag down a little on my saturation.
Then I'll go back to Hue and I'm gonna pick up
on the yellow door and I'm gonna go ahead
and start dragging that down to bring those values,
the orange and yellow,
closer to the orange value in the bike.
So you can see, you can make a lot of color changes.
And if you think about it,
we could actually take this to black and white
as well and use the Black & White options to change
the color ranges, how that converts to black and white.
But now I wanna keep this in color
and I just wanna show you one other way
because you might be thinking,
"Well, maybe you didn't wanna bring those two colors
"closer together, maybe you wanted to have
"the bike change to a different color."
You'll notice that when I click and drag to change the hue,
we really can't get a green bicycle.
If you wanted to do that, then we need
to switch over to our adjustment brush.
I'm gonna bring the saturation all the way down.
So I'm actually removing the saturation.
And then I'm going to click in this color swatch right here,
and we can go ahead and pick a green color.
So now when we paint, and I'll just get
a little bit smaller of a paint brush here,
you can see that what's happening is
I've got auto-mask turned on so Lightroom is automatically
creating a mask so that I don't go over into the blue area.
And the adjustment brush is basically taking out
all of the saturation wherever I paint
and then overlaying the green color that I selected.
And if I paint too far all I need
to do is hold down the Option key
and then we can go ahead and back that out
'cause I didn't mean to paint that in the tire there.
And then, again, I can get a smaller brush
just using the left bracket key
and go in and refine this and make any other adjustments.
Again, I went a little too far there so, again,
hold down the option key and just paint that out.
What the Option key or the Alt Key on Windows
does is it basically just changes
from your brush to the eraser tool.
So that's a way that you would go in
and actually hand color an image.
Just remember, if you are going
to hand color an image don't take it to grayscale,
don't tap the V key and go to grayscale,
use the Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity area down here
and just remove all of the saturation.
Otherwise you're not going to be able to paint in the image
because you told Lightroom to take it to grayscale.
So, using a combination of Hue, Saturation, and Luminosity
as well as the adjustment brush should allow you
to make all of the selective color changes
that you need in Lightroom.
My name's Julieanne Kost, thanks for watching.
(dramatic music)