Fine-tuning colours in Raw
Use the HSL controls to change Hue, Saturation and Lightness
With Raw files, you can correct the colours – or manipulate them – when you work up an image in Raw processing software. As well as making global colour adjustments that affect the whole picture, such as increasing or decreasing the saturation, or tweaking the white balance, you can make selective adjustments to specific colours.
For example, any Raw processor worth its salt will include a tool for fine-tuning the Hue, Saturation and Lightness (HSL) of individual colours. In Canon’s Digital Photo Professional, you’ll find this under ‘Color adjustment’ in the tools palette.
I use HSL regularly, increasing the lightness of orange a little for portraits of people with pale skin in order to lift the skin tones, for example, or increasing the lightness of yellow and green to help separate elements in a landscape shot.
HSL adjustments – or the H and L elements, at least – are also useful when working on black and white images, as they can help to add contrast where there perhaps is none when the colour is removed.
You won’t be able to do this in Digital Photo Professional if the Picture Style is set to Monochrome. Instead, select a colour Picture Style, click ‘Monochrome’ at the top of the ‘Color adjustment’ palette, and then adjust the Hue and Lightness sliders.
One thing to consider is that although these adjustments target specific colours, they do so across the whole image. So you need to make sure you’re not altering the colour of an object in another part of the shot that you hadn’t intended to change. For more selective changes, you can use the adjustment brush for targeted WB and saturation changes.