Controlling Colour in your Photography (Hue, Saturation and Luminance)

this episode is sponsored by audible where you can download and listen to some of the world's best storytelling if you're a color photographer i think the colors that you choose to feature in your images are a huge part of the story that you're trying to tell and getting control of those colors and how you include them or exclude them is a really important skill set to teach yourself you won't ever find me selling presets on this channel and the reason for that is simple i would rather take the time to teach you how to create your own looks than sell you mine and i also think the presets are limited in that not every preset fits every image you might have found that depending on the lighting or the color in the scene your favorite preset doesn't work for some images and does work for others and you're going to need to make custom tweaks yourself the argument might be that you just buy the preset to get you close and then you make those tweaks yourself to get you the rest of the way but i would suggest that if you take the time to teach yourself how to make those custom tweaks to get you that final twenty percent or whatever it is that you're actually most of the way there to creating your own look from scratch and isn't that a more exciting journey don't get me wrong i have nothing against photographers who sell presets if they're willing to sell them and people are willing to buy them it's none of my business i used to buy presets when i was starting out i think i was big into the vsco presets at one stage building them into lightroom and i found them a great learning tool trying to work out what i wanted to see in my images but as i started to apply them and then have to tweak them or dial them back or change the colors slightly i realized one day that i kind of knew enough to do this myself now and that's the day when i started to create looks for myself at the end of the day presets are just little packets of data that apply color tweaks and contrast tweaks to your images and the road to learning that stuff isn't as long as you think it might be especially if you choose to keep things simple which personally i do so in this video i'm gonna introduce you to one powerful tool that you likely already have in your editing software of choice that's going to help you take control of the colors in your images but let me start by introducing you to a concept why is this looks so cinematic a compliment we see in a lot of comment sections under images people saying this has a cinematic quality to it and it seems a lot of us are aiming to try and get that quality into our work my theory is that when people give this compliment they've identified an intentional mood and look in the image where color contrast and composition all come together to provide a feeling for the scene that's captured in the same way that we get when we watch a film on screen and when we shoot like this or edit like this we're moving away from straight reportage and we're stylizing and pushing things more towards creative storytelling but i want to get more specific than that because i think one of the things we associate with the look of cinema or when we give that compliment this looks so cinematic i think what we're identifying is a limited color space or a reduced color palette and that's what i want to focus on in this video in life assuming you have good color vision all colors are represented to you equally none of favored over the other so if light hits a blue surface it will reflect back to your eye as blue trees appear green red sunsets appear red and if you took the world's most color neutral sensor and you shot the world it would do the same thing as your ics it would just represent every color equally and accurately in the image however cinema isn't concerned with accuracy it's really only news outlets now that go around and film very neutrally just trying to replicate the world as we see it because it's about reportage but cinema is creative storytelling so that means that sets are dressed people are clothed in particular colors things a little particular way and things are graded a particular way in post because the filmmakers are toning the image to elicit a particular response to you and to get you to feel a particular mood in the scene just look at the difference in color between this screen grab of a behind the scenes look at gladiator with its muddy brown hues because that's how it looked on the day and the cool color grade they ended up with in the film which is applied to make you feel the chill of winter on the german border if you want to convey romance or love then you probably want to play with warmer more saturated colors like this famous shot from titanic but again it didn't look like that on the day of filming they toned the image that way in post to convey the mood of a romantic sunset i've done the same thing with this footage i mean this is what the shot looks like straight out of camera it's very gray and flat and washed out but i could have graded this footage this way or this way but i chose to grade it this way because i was deliberate about wanting to set a mood i still wanted good skin tone but i wanted to create the feeling that you and i were sitting together in my lounge late at night just having a chat and grading the footage this way is less about color accuracy and more about setting a mood to the image so understanding that creating a cinematic look is all about being deliberate about which colors to include and which colors to exclude from your final image let's take a look at two of the most basic ways that you can limit your color space and create that mood and feel to your shot the first is using an analogous color scheme and analogous colors are just groups of colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel and serve to give an almost monochromatic or single color feel to the image look at this shot from blade runner 2049 the filmmakers have pulled out every color except for oranges and reds so that we feel heat desolation and soft light filtering through the dust and particulate matter left from a dirty bomb no other color fits in this scene and strong green or blue would be completely out of place and break the spell it was fairly monochromatic on set when filming by design but you can see how they pushed the color they wanted into the shot to convey that mood look at this shot from moonlight skin tone isn't that color and even though twilight cools the colors down in real life those are not the colors you would see if you were standing there the filmmakers have stylized the look by severely limiting the color space another popular way to limit color space is using complementary color schemes which are colors that sit on the opposite ends of the color wheel from each other for example red and green or orange and blue here's a still from true grit which demonstrates that very traditional hollywood teal and orange look it pushes cyan hues into the shadows and oranges into the mid tones and highlights to maintain good skin tones and then does away with all other colors here's another shot from moonlight which shows a really beautiful complementary color mix between reds and greens which also sit at opposite ends of the color wheel the cinematographer has deliberately chosen to grade the image this way to simplify the palette and create the right mood for the shot to greater or lesser degrees we can use the same principles to create mood and tell better stories with our own images now let me say personally i don't like a heavy touch in my images and i use these principles very lightly but just to show you how far you can push things let me show you three photographers work who i think do a great job of pushing things quite far but creating a beautiful cinematic mood to their shots danton on instagram for example runs a consistent theme of rich saturated peachy oranges and pastel cyan colors through his work not every color on the color wheel is represented equally in his images because he's either pulled out colors or pushed hues around to limit the variety of colors notice his skies and seas for example are never blue like they are in real life because he's always pushing them into the cyan space tanya franco klein is another one who works to create a beautiful limited palette playing off complementary colors of greens and reds skies are never blue in her shots either and skin tones are always a very saturated orange verging on red and it serves to give a surreal feel to her images lumino on instagram is one of my favorites his work to me is some of the most purposefully cinematic i've seen he doesn't stick to one palette either but plays around with limiting his color space using analogous and complementary schemes based on the mood he is trying to evoke from you like i said these are quite dramatic examples and personally i don't like to push things quite this far i like a far more natural look to my images but still knowing those basic principles helps me to tone my shots and tell better stories even in subtle ways i hope this gets you excited about the possibilities of creating and designing your own look to your images i mean we live in an amazing time where with the software at our disposal and just a basic knowledge of the tools inside it we get to design our own look from the ground up and have total control over every fine detail so today i'm going to introduce you to one really powerful tool that on its own i think if you get a handle on you can start to build your own look into your work and it's likely already in your editing software of choice and it's the hsl sliders or the hue saturation and luminance tool so let's jump in okay so we're going to start in photoshop and don't worry if you don't use photoshop i'm going to show you how to edit these images the same way in lightroom in a minute but just to show you the concept i thought we'd start in photoshop and what we're going to do at the beginning is just come down here to our add adjustment layer and we're going to come up to hue saturation and this is our hue saturation and lightness or luminance tool and this works basically the same in every piece of software so you have three different ways that you can edit colors you've got lightness which obviously speaks for itself light and dark you've got saturation which i'm sure you'll understand pulls color out or pushes color in to your colors and you've got your hue and i'm going to just slide this around and watch what it does can you see that looks like the wheel's spinning like that left to right clockwise and anti-clockwise as i drag it around what the hue slider is doing is it's taking colors and it's pushing them round the color wheel either clockwise or anti-clockwise so say for example we want to edit just a single color here obviously you can see at the moment it's set to master we don't want to edit the whole color scheme that's not going to be helpful with this tool so let's just say we select reds for example now if we take our lightness here can you see it's affecting a few different pie slices on this one because it's not just actually selecting the reds you can see at the bottom here uh photoshop actually shows you what colors are selected so the reds are selected in between these two markers but you've also got this kind of gradient where the effect falls off to either side that includes some magentas and some oranges so i'm just going to tighten this up pulling these little sliders in so it should just be the red selected now so if i dial left and right there we go so you can see lightness at the bottom here is going to either lighten up or darken down the color that's selected and at the moment that's just red a saturation is just going to dial the saturation out or in to the color that was selected which is the reds and our hue is well let me show you if i dial to the left watch that red pie slice it's going to start to go pink magenta round to blues and cyan so what it's doing is it's dragging it left through these colors so red is becoming magenta and purple and coming round to blues and cyans if i dial to the right it's going to come around this way it's going to go orange and then it's going to yellow and green so take it back to the middle and as i dialed the right orange yellow and green so that's what your hue slider does and it's really your hue slider and your saturation slider those two sliders in particular are going to help you build the color look in your images so let's imagine you've got a photograph in front of you that you want to work on i'm going to leave this up at the moment because we'll we'll edit the actual photos in lightroom i want you to see for now what it's doing to the individual colors so let's imagine that i want to create a tone in my image that works off the complementary colors of blue and orange and i want to limit my color space to mostly blues and oranges at the moment every color is equally represented so what do we need to take care of well what colors don't fit we don't want the magentas really and we don't really want the yellows and the greens and the red so let's go down to our magentas and let's say if we dial it round this way we can turn them blue because we're taking these magentas and we're dialing around the color wheel and we're bringing them more towards the blue let's come down to our cyans which is going to work down here a little bit let's dial those to the right and we're bringing those to blue as well so we've already severely limited that space and brought these all together let's select our reds and if we bring those to the right we've turned our red to a more orangey color let's go to our greens we could go either way with greens really we could bring the greens to the blues but in this case let's bring them more towards those oranges and then all we need to take care of the last color in there are those yellows and we can bring those towards orange as well so you can see we've totally compressed the color space to mostly oranges and to blues and yes there's some red in there as well but you can see the idea is that we've compressed that space down we don't want every color to be exactly the same we just want to limit that color space let me just take a quick break before jumping in to edit some images to thank audible for sponsoring this episode they're the world's leading provider of spoken word entertainment at audiobooks and signing up with them means you will get one free audio book and two free audible originals every single month and if you cancel at any point you still get to keep your entire library personally one of the ways i use audible is when i'm editing images because the visual part of my brain can focus on the work that i'm doing but the auditory part of my brain is free to still take in a load of information so i can plow through books all the while working on my images if i could recommend one book to you it would be sapiens by yuval noah harari it's one of those huge sweeping books giving the whole of human history and a lot of the answers as to why we are where we are today as a species and i love these kind of big picture books but in all honesty i struggle to just sit in a chair and read books like that because they can be quite thick and rich and dense but because i was listening to it it meant that while i was commuting with headphones in all while i was sitting and editing those images i found that i was able to take it in and plough through that book and really enjoyed it that way so if you want to give audible a try they're offering a risk-free trial where you get to download one free audiobook and two free audible originals all you need to do is go to audible.com forward slash sean tucker or text sean tucker to 500 500. okay so let's edit some images so we're here in lightroom and i'm going to use this image in front of us as an example and just to say before we start remember that i don't use a very heavy-handed look when it comes to my colors but i just use those principles lightly to kind of clean up the color space in the image and turn it into something with slightly less distractions so in this image what i usually do is i just start to pull in the contrast into the images it's a good place to begin because as you pull your contrast into the shot let's boost this brightness up a little bit bring some of the blacks down and some of the shadows as you play with your contrast in the image what you'll find is it's going to bring more saturation into your shot which kind of helps you to see what colors you've got to work with sometimes a nice thing to do just to see exactly what i'm working with is literally just come down to the saturation slider here at the bottom this is global saturation just jack it right up to the top so you can see there's quite a cool tone throughout there's lots of kind of blues this was actually shot sort of uh early morning i think because the shot was opening up and you can see there's kind of a very blue tone to that light and a warmer tone inside so if i just double click on this it's going to zero that back out so in this case let's say that just to clean up my color space to limit my color palette so there aren't as many distractions i'm going to go with an analogous color space and that analogous space is going to be built around some kind of desaturated oranges and sort of brown tones and red so that's the kind of look that i'm going for so first thing i need to deal with is the blues i think the blues are very distracting so let's come over to my blue and i'm going to start to desaturate that blue down just keep an eye on his jeans and you'll see what it's doing and then i'm going to darken it down a little bit as well and straight away you can see that's kind of cleaned up some of that space a little bit let's go to my cyans i'm going to do the same i'm going to desaturate those cyans and bring the luminance down a little bit and i'm going to come here to my magentas there's kind of some pinky magentas and stuff happening in some of these covers but also in the neon up there at the top i'm just going to desaturate those a touch not quite as much and i'm going to take my pinks and i'm going to pull them more over into the red space i'm compressing these bringing them all the way around to this red on the side here let's take the yellows and i'm going to pull the yellows into the oranges so you can see especially things like this sign here are going to be affected by this and that's just sort of compressing the yellows into that orange space a bit more and desaturate those come over to my oranges and i'm going to saturate my oranges a bit because that's sort of a feature that analogous spaces is what i want to bring out and my reds i'm going to drag those slightly into that orange space as well so we're turning the reds slightly orange on top of that the greens i don't think there's any green in this shot that we have to worry about up and down actually you can see it there's a lot in the lighting above and that often happens with kind of overhead neon in shops so we have a choice we can either desaturate that but in this case i'm going to bring it over to that yellow orange color space as well so we've taken our greens and yellows put them more in the orange we've taken our reds and our magentas and put them more over to the orange we've desaturated our blues and our science and if we turn this on and off you can see we've made a huge difference and we've cleaned out our color space and we've given it a much more kind of muted earthy brown tone that's just kind of bringing everything together so not every color is now evenly represented as it was shot that's on purpose so that we can have this sort of more muted tones in our shot okay so let's take a look at another image so this image i shot in italy and you can see in this image that there are already complementary colors at play with this orange and the rust on the metal and the blue sky and i always think it's much better to find complementary colors in your images and use them as part of your composition than trying to drag them that way in post instead of force them into that space so here's an example where i already limited my color space in the way that i composed the shot but we can play with different options within this even though we've already got complementary colors so first thing i want to do again is just drag my shadows down on my curves and pull my highlights up uh just to bring in a bit of contrast again because contrast first because that's going to affect the saturation help me see what colors i've got to play with let's just pull my black point down just a little bit just to get rid of some of that detail underneath so we've got some nice negative space okay so i'm going to come down here to our color mixer by the way lightroom just calls hue saturation luminance is just called color mixer on here and sometimes you'll just need to drop it down under color this little arrow here will release it underneath so we're adjusting our colors we've already got this lovely strong orange and we've got the blue sky but we can work it better so that these complementary colors pop against each other like they would on the color wheel so let's start with our blue selected and just saturate our blues just to bring out some of that sky detail and with our luminance with the blue selected we're going to bring that down a bit just so those clouds pop nicely and we've got more contrast and let's say now because i know there are going to be a bunch of different hues within this orange and we can compress that so there might be some green in that rust we're just going to drag that over towards the orange let's take the yellows and pull them towards the orange and let's take the reds because there will be red in here as well and we'll pull those into that orange space as well so we've compressed our yellows and greens into orange our reds into orange and we've got our blues which are popping nicely let's just select our cyans and we're going to drag those towards the blue as well because there will be some cyan in the sky so what we're doing is we're we're really creating kind of a very monochromatic blue sky that's going to pop nicely against honestly in this case i don't think we're going to need to worry about our purples and magentas and pinks and stuff so that as an image on its own already looks great that blue really pops against the orange and works really really well but say in this case we wanted to go a different direction with exactly the same image what if we let's just zero all this out for a second just double clicking the little circle in the middle of your line here sets it back to zero just a little tip for you so right back to the beginning again our oranges stayed the same and our reds came back okay so let's say in this case we actually wanted to work with a different color space we're going to do something slightly more stylized this time and less realistic let's work off a red cyan sort of a reddy green color space on our color wheel instead so in that case what we'd want to do is take our oranges in that rust and pull them over to the red you see what that's doing there and yellows we're going to pull those more over into that red orange space so it's quite stylized now we're going to desaturate our greens i don't think there's going to be much in there and with our blues we're going to drag those to the left and it's going to turn our sky to a cyan just a little bit and then with the cyan selected we're going to saturate the cyans and sort of pull some color in there and then with our luminance we're going to dial that to the left to do exactly the same sort of thing select the blues and dial that to the left and that's going to bring out that nice sky detail so you can see we've gone a different direction this time we've taken in this case we've taken our yellows and oranges and pulled them into that red space to turn this red and we've taken our blues and pulled them into the cyans to again create a complementary color space but this time totally different it just shows you with your image you can go different directions but keeping that color wheel in mind and those color schemes you can create really striking images all right let's do one more image and this is an image i just took this is a famous little spot around the corner from piccadilly circus there's some mirrors above and i just snapped a quick selfie while i was walking through and in this image again let's start and just pull in our contrast so just a little bit of a highlight bump not too much style that back and shadows honestly i don't want too much more contrast than that in there and let's come down again to our saturation slider just jack this right the way up and see what we've got and in this case we've got some kind of very yellowy greens and we've got some oranges over here we've got some cyans and blues in the signage and some blues at the back you can see there's cooler colors at the back with the daylight washing through so we really want to clean up this color space and and sort of turn it into something that sort of pulls together a little bit more and i think the obvious thing in this case is because this green is great i really want to work off the green but let's work off a red green space which would work nicely as complementary colors on our color wheel again so what we want to do is the first thing we want to grab our yellows let's say and we're going to drag those to the left and bring them sort of more into that orange space oranges we're going to bring them more to the left and especially watch this doorway we're pulling it more into that red space and then we're going to take our reds saturate the reds and just saturate those oranges in that doorway so you can see nicely now that the red is sort of going to pop more against the green but because there's so much yellow in this green they're sort of too close together so why don't we take this green and cool it off a little bit so we've got green selected now we're going to pull it to the right on the hues and that's just going to cool that green down a little bit and then we can saturate it as well and these kind of really pop nicely against each other now i think that works really well as a color scheme and little things we want to take care of now i want to get rid of some of these blues and start to simplify at the color space so the blue the daylight the back and the signage so let's get our cyans and we're going to desaturate that and our blues and we're going to desaturate that as well and that's kind of stylized the shot a lot more and it's turned it into something that's just a more simple color space nice strong green nice strong red and everything else is fairly simple so the only other thing to mention i think is i know a lot of you at this point will be going oh if i only want two colors in my shot why don't i just use split toning let me show you why i don't use split toning and i prefer this method so your split turning will just be a drop down down the bottom here you've got your your shadow point on the left at the bottom and your highlight point on the right so let's say we were going for a red and green mix again so i'm going to pull my shadows uh up as red and i'm going to bring my highlight point over into the sort of cyan greens over here and you can see as you pull this around and sort of introduce those colors and you dial this left and right you can change the color mix of those colors but the reason i don't like this is because it applies a wash to the entire image so now this uh these tones here at the back aren't that gray anymore there's no separation with them everything is toned either that green or that red and i still like some separation between the colors because i think it's important to still keep the colors separated from each other rather than have something that applies as kind of a wash or a global filter over the top so if i turn this off you can see that there's more separation in those colors with the strong colors down the bottom here and strong color here but less color at the top and it says splits the image up a little bit more because sometimes you'll have highlights in your image which are are yellows and r sort of greens and r blues and what this will do is apply one color to all those highlights even if they were separate colors instead of keeping two strong colors and then some sort of neutral space where those old colors used to be so if you want color contrast in your image i would always suggest using this color mixer or using hue saturation luminance in photoshop just because it gives you that finesse to be able to use individual colors pulling them into your space and pulling them out and gives you a ton more control and that's why i find this hue saturation luminance tool so powerful in being able to create your own looks from scratch so i hope this has helped and shown you a little bit of what's possible remember this is just one tool of many but i think if you get a handle on this tool alone it's going to take you a long way to creating your own look in your images so maybe just play around if you've got a project coming up maybe try and tone your images the same way across that project see if you can get some consistency in it and some mood to the images that helps you tell a better story remember as you play around and experiment to keep that color wheel in mind and as you limit that color space be deliberate about which colors you exclude and specifically which colors you feature and think about what moods do those colors generate in your viewers and how are those colors going to help you tell a better story have fun and good luck you

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 171,369

Keywords: colour, color, photography, cinematic, analogous colours, complementary colours, hue, saturation, luminance, hsl sliders, hsl tool, adobe lightroom, adobe photoshop, cinematic look, limiting your colour space, limiting your colour palette, controlling colour, editing color, color photography

Id: 09CAkP6LJbw

Length: 26min 57sec (1617 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020