Add a colour boost with HSL

Shift the colours to a more autumnal palette using Hue, Saturation and Luminosity tweaks

Even though you can adjust your camera’s white balance and switch the Picture Style or Film Simulation settings to give an overall warmer and punchier result, these changes affect the whole picture. When you start making adjustments to an image in software, however, you can be a bit more selective.

You may find that the autumn colours haven’t exploded in a synchronised burst across the landscape, for example, with some trees retaining green leaves alongside the burnt tones of autumn. By selecting green in the HSL Panel of your editing software, then shifting Hue towards yellow, however, you can fast-track the seasonal change. This adjustment will affect all the greens in the image, so you may want to remove this change from areas such as grass by using a mask.

Try selectively boosting the saturation and luminosity of red, orange and yellow to enhance the autumn glow.

HSL allows you to target and change specific colours, although the effect is applied ‘globally’.

Turn green into yellow and yellow into orange with a few clicks of your mouse button.