My Photographic Process Part 4 - Hue/Saturation

This is the final part of my photographic process where I discussed sharpening in part 1, curves in part 2 and color balance in part 3.

As before, I do all of these in Adobe Photoshop.

In this part, I'm going to show you how I adjust Hue and Saturation. First you create Hue/Saturation layer.

You'll see the Hue/Saturation window come out and there are three sliders. Hue, saturation and lightness. I almost never use the lightness. In fact, I don't think I've ever used it at all. I usually adjust the curves or brightness and contrast. Play around with the "lightness" slider and you'll see why I don't use it.

So let me explain the difference between hue and saturation.

When you adjust the hue slider, you actually adjust the color of the photo. Slide it too much to the left or right, it actually changes the color of the photo. Now this may or may not be good for you. It depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to maintain the original color of your photo, you probably don't want to adjust the hue slider.

Saturation on the other hand is adjusting how intense or how soft you want your colors to be. Move the saturation slider to the right, the colors gets more intense. Move it to the left, it becomes soft to the point your photo turns into a black and white photo. Go ahead, play with it.

In this photo, I only wanted to adjust the saturation and not the hue. But I already like the color, I just wanted a little tweaking. So I moved the saturation slider to the right until I get +3.

That's all there is to it. At this point, I'm happy with the photo and no further adjustment was necessary. I just clicked OK and saved the photo.

I have some photos below where I played around with the hue. Here you can see how adjusting hue can affect the colors of your photo.

Here is the original photo with no adjustment in the hue slider.

Let's see what happens when I move the slider a little to the left.

The yellow airbag now turns orange and the blue airbag is a little more greenish.

Let's see what happens when I move the slider more to the left.

Now all the yellow colors have turned into red and the blue has turned green or turquoise or teal maybe? Probably turquoise.

Anyway, look at what happens when I move the slider to the right.

The airbag looks a lighter yellow. Actually, it doesn't look bad this way. A little more adjustment in the contrast and brightness might make it look better. But I decided not to do it since I wanted to maintain how it originally looked.

Now if I move the slider more to the right, this is what happens.

The yellow airbag now turns green and the blue airbag turned purple. These wouldn't be such a problem if the sky didn't turn a different color and if the girl didn't look green as well. That's an unhealthy green on the girl.

But now you can see what the hue slider can do. You can actually set it up to only change the color of the airbag and not the whole picture by using the marquee tool. But that is a more advance tutorial for some other time. As I mentioned before, I don't do a lot of manipulation of my photos other than making adjusting colors and contrast. I sometimes adjust hue and saturation as well if I'm not getting what I want, but I try to keep to the original as close as possible.

I hope this has been helpful to you in some way. If you have any processes that you do to your photos, please share them in the comments. I'd love to hear what other people do to make their photos better.