Sometimes the color of an image appears too strong or too weak. Photoshop and Photoshop Elements contain a "Hue/Saturation" tool that can correct these situations. Hue is another name for color, while saturation refers to color intensity. For advanced users of image processing packages, hue/saturation is best used in association with Photoshop Layers, but we will restrict our discussions to the more general case.

Quick Start Instructions

Photoshop: Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation
Photoshop Elements V3.0: Enhance > Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Saturation

• Select Master or individual colors
• Adjust sliders to saturate or desaturate
  • adjust hue, and/or
  • adjust brightness

Usage Details

Launch the Hue/Saturation tool:
Photoshop: Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation
Photoshop Elements V3.0: Enhance > Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Saturation

Basic (Common) Usage

The Hue/Saturation control allows us to change colors (hue), enrich or dull colors (saturation), lighten or darken colors (lightness) and even use it to create a color cast in an image. Hue is what most people call color, saturation is how pure color is. Lightness refers to how bright, or not bright, something is.

One begins by selecting the colors to be adjusted in an image. This can be done by using the top drop-down menu called Edit.

You may select: Master (all colors), or from a range of different colors including: Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue and Magenta. In most cases it is best to use individual color adjustments rather than Master. After choosing a color, moving any slider will change colors.

Unless you are trying out strange effects, it is best not to use Hue or Lightness in the "Master" mode. Hue can produce odd effects when all colors are involved, and lightness may look like it does a nice job at changing exposure, but may not. These two controls are most effective when dealing with individual colors.

The dialog box contains three sliders.

• Hue - This slider takes you through the color spectrum for a selected color. At the bottom you can see two color bars, between which narrow horizontal rectangles (sliders) are found that show how colors are laid out in the spectrum. The upper color bar remains constant and the bottom bar changes depending on the Hue, Saturation and Lightness settings.
• Saturation - Deals with color intensity. Saturation is how pure or vivid hue is. A color with absolutely no saturation is gray. A color that is 100% saturated is in its most intense form. To increase saturation, move the Saturation slider to the right. To decrease it, move the slider to the left. When desaturating, the gray scale values are maintained, and the color decreased. When saturating, the exact opposite happens.
• Lightness - Affects the brightness level of whatever image you're editing. The Lightness slider should be used sparingly. For most tonal adjustments, consider using Levels or Curves. Hue/Saturation targets changes by color range. If we use Hue/Saturation to lighten the Red color range, we lighten all reds from dark red to medium red to light red.

By moving the Hue slider in the Hue/Saturation dialog box, the colors will shift. By applying saturation values to specific color options, you can selectively fade or fortify colors. Saturation may be useful for toning down images captured with scanners that exaggerate colors.

Example 1: The following image looks flat, the colors are dull. To intensify the colors we will use Hue/Saturation and improve the image.

In this example we will use the Master Edit and move the saturation slider as shown in the dialogue box which follows.

These slider movements results are shown in the following image. This control increases the intensity of all colors.

The above shows the effect of using the Master Edit mode.

Example 2: In this example we will increase the intensity of selected colors. The only colors that will change in intensity are those we selecte. We begin again with the original image was shown earlier. The colors we choose to make more intense are the "Red" and "Yellow" colors. We first select "Red" from the Hue/Saturation dialogue box to work with (we could have picked either red of yellow) and move the slider to the right to intensify reds in the image. When we are done we click OK.

The result of intensifying Red is shown below. Note in the dialogue box above - the possible Red hues are shown in the color bars at the bottom bounded by brackets.

Next we intensify "Yellow"s. We again launch the Hue/Saturation Dialogue Box, move the Saturation slider and click OK when done.

This image below is the result of intensifying yellows.

If you were intensifying colors in the image above, you may have chosen to intensify additional colors. You could have also altered hue's related to each color selected.

Other Uses of Hue/Saturation

Eyedropper and Color Bars

These tools are infrequently used, but are available from the Hue/Saturation dialogue box. We will give some explanation as to their purpose, but will leave examples to the interested readers.

When we select an individual color, eyedropper tools become active. These eyedroppers should not be confused with eyedroppers on Levels and Curves commands. In Levels and Curves, eyedroppers allow us to set black, white and gamma points. In Hue/Saturation they allow custom defining of the color range by selecting and deselecting colors in the image.

By default, if one selects Yellow, for example, from the Edit menu, it is assigned a value of 60° on a color wheel (shown below.) The normal range of yellow that will be effected is from 45° to 75°, with 30° on each side (or from 15° to 105° used for feathering the range of colors. The eyedropper is effective in this range of color only for a selected color.

Color Wheel

Note: the colors in the wheel are indicated by degrees (generally 0° to 360°), the degree values are shown throughout all the dialogue boxes in this write-up when a color is selected from the "Edit" menu. Colors shown on the color wheel match colors in the "Edit" pull down box

Color Wheel Converted to a Color Bar

Color bars are displayed at the bottom of the Hue/Saturation dialogue box (see above) If one wrapped the color bar end to end one would have the color wheel shown below. There are two color bars shown in the dialogue box. The upper color bar remains constant and the lower color bar (with sliders) is changed depending on the color selected from the Edit menu. When we select an individual color, the bottom color bar with sliders (imbedded between the color bars) is enabled. The inside sliders between color bars represent the 30° range around the selected color (see the explanation for eyedroppers), and the outer sliders represent the feathering range for the selected color. One can modify the color range by moving the inside set of sliders, or modify the feathering range by moving the outside set of sliders between the color bars. You may modify the color range or the range of colors affected by feathering, by altering these sliders.

Colorize

The Colorize option changes the nature of Hue/Saturation. When checked, it removes color from an image and overlays the image with a tint of a single hue and saturation. Each pixel's luminosity remains unchanged. With Colorize, hue and saturation values are no longer relative numbers based on an offset from a starting point. Instead, they are absolute numbers. The hue value ranges from 0° to 360° and represents an absolute position on a color wheel, as seen below. (0° and 360° are the same color - red.) The Saturation value ranges from 0% to 100%. If Saturation is changed to 0%, color is negated and the pixels will be gray.

The colorize option of Hue/Saturation applies only one color. When using Hue/Saturation to colorize an image, whites and blacks will not be colorized, mid tones have the most color applied and the shadow and highlight areas will show the least. Using Hue/Saturation to tone a black and white image is described here.

Example 3: Immediately above is the original image that we will work with in this example. Again we launch the Hue/Saturation dialogue box as follows

In the dialogue box, we first checked the "Colorize" box, converting the image to greyscale. Next, we adjust the Hue and Saturation slider controls until we get a color that looks pleasing (the dialogue box shows the Hue and Saturation sliders used). The resulting image is shown below. Most people feel that colorize is not a very useful function.

Most images benefit from increased saturation of selected colors. Reds and yellows are saturated/desaturated more frequently than other. On occasions it is necessary to desaturate blues in an image. Yellow is found in the greens of grasses and trees - one has to take care in increasing Yellow too much as it may adversely effect colors of grass and leaves.

Please see other lessons in this series for additional Photoshop or Photoshop Elements tools that can assist you improve your digital images.