From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Changing colors using Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, and Color Balance - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Changing colors using Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, and Color Balance

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- [Instructor] There are a number of different ways to make adjustments to color and color ranges in Photoshop. We're going to take the next few minutes in order to explore the vibrance, hue and saturation, and color balance adjustment layers. I'll start with the vibrance adjustment layer. There are two different sliders, one for vibrance and one for saturation. They're great for making quick adjustments, and both sliders are relative. As I move the vibrance slider over to the right, it's not going to change the yellows and oranges as much as the vibrance slider, so it's good for, say, popping color in a landscape without changing any skin tones. Now, saturation is relative. It does change all of the colors more equally, so the oranges and yellows included, but it keeps a relative distance between the colors so that they don't all end up at the same 100% saturation, and this can prevent the loss of details in highly saturated areas of an image. Now, if I go the other way, then I'm going to remove all of the color in my image if I use saturation, but there are better ways to remove color, including the black and white adjustment layer, which will be covered later in the course. If I go minus 100 with vibrance, because it's relative to the amount of color that was in the image to begin with, we'll notice that we still have color in our image. We can use the two sliders together, so for example, if I wanted to increase the blues without increasing the yellows and oranges, we could use vibrance, and then I could back off on the overall saturation using the saturation slider. All right, another great way to make both global changes as well as selective changes to color ranges is by using the hue saturation adjustment layer. So we can make global changes, meaning that if I change the hue slider, all of the hues in the image will change. or if I use the saturation slider, the same thing will happen. And by the way, the saturation slider here is not relative, so if I go all the way over to 100%, it saturates everything 100%. Okay, you can also affect specific color ranges. So for example, if I only wanted to affect the yellow color range, I can select it from the list. That adds these icons here between the two rainbow strips, so the area between the two vertical lines, that's going to be affected 100%, and then between the vertical line and this little tick mark, that's the fade range, so it will slowly become less and less affected. If I move the saturation to negative 100, we can see it's desaturated on the bottom rainbow, so that's the after, and the top one is the before. If I position my cursor between these two icons and drag over to the left, then more colors are affected and we can see the results not only in the image area, but also in this rainbow here. We could also use the eyedropper to select a color in the image, so I can pick that up and then click over here to the blues, and any adjustment that I had made would be made to those blues. All right, let's reset that because I like to use the onscreen adjustment here. Now I can just position my cursor over the color that I want to change, and if I click and drag to the left, it'll decrease the saturation, and to the right, it will increase the saturation. If I hold down the command key on Mac or control key on Windows, then it's going to change the hue, so to the left or to the right. So if I wanted to make these a little bit more orange, I'd hold down the command key, then release the command key and drag to desaturate it a bit. Another way to adjust color is with color balance, so let's add that and hide the hue and saturation. The advantage here is that I can add color to my shadows, midtones, or highlights. So for example, if you had a cyan cast in your shadows, you could select that and then just move cyan more towards red in order to remove that. We could also add in a little bit of yellow if we wanted to warm up those shadows. and if we want to prevent them from being shown in the midtones, we could select that and just make sure they aren't by going in the opposite direction. So a little towards cyan and a little bit towards blue. So we can use this to correct the color in an image, but we can also use it to add creative effects. So if I wanted to make this a little bit more futuristic or bleak, or maybe make it look like we were under fluorescent lights, I could go to the highlights and add in a little bit of green and maybe even a little bit of cyan. You can use the eye icon in order to show before and after. And we can also use the layer masks for any of these adjustment layers to only affect a specific area in the image, and we can come back to the image at any time to make refinements or adjustments to the layers. So there you have it, three easy ways to make adjustments to color, a specific color range, the shadows, midtones, or highlights, and the vibrance and saturation of images.

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