Have you ever opened the HSL panel in Lightroom and felt overwhelmed, unsure how to use it while editing your photos? Most of our presets utilize the HSL panel in one way or another, but you can fine-tune your edits and adjust the sliders in the HSL panel after applying a preset to achieve the exact colors you want!

In this article, we’ll cover some basics of the HSL panel so you can work with color like a Lightroom pro!

What is the HSL panel?

HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance, and you can manipulate the sliders for each individual color (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, Magenta) to the left or right for precise control over how colors appear. Lightroom recently changed the name of the HSL panel to “Color Mixer”, incorporating both the Mixer (HSL) panel and Point Color panel under one title.

Hue refers to the actual color and you can change the color to a different color, like shifting red to make it more orange or more magenta on the color spectrum.

Saturation refers to the intensity of a color, decreasing this slider makes colors more dull and gray and increasing it makes them brighter and more vivid.

Luminance refers to the brightness or darkness of a color— increasing it makes colors appear lighter and decreasing it makes them darker.

HSL adjustments can help you make certain colors in your photos stand out or appear less distracting. You can alter the tones of water or the sky (adjust HSL to create a more tropical water appearance, like teal or arctic blue, or make skies look more stormy, etc.), enhance seasonal color palettes by saturating autumn foliage, or even change the season entirely by shifting greens and yellows toward orange. You can even correct indoor lighting without altering the white balance of the whole photo by adjusting the yellows to tone down overly warm lighting. The possibilities are endless!

**Tip**:

If you want to pinpoint an exact color to manipulate in your image, click the little concentric circles to the left of the Hue, Saturation, or Luminance title and hover over your image. You’ll see which colors are affected in the sliders, and you can click and drag in your photo to adjust the specific color in the photo itself.

You can make some VERY dramatic color edits just by using the HSL panel on an image straight out of camera, drastically changing the mood of the image you’re working on.

Making HSL Adjustments with Presets

So, now you know how to use HSL on an otherwise unedited image— but how does this panel come into play when you’re editing with one of our presets? As I said previously, most Archipelago Presets and Quest Presets utilize the HSL Panel as part of the preset settings. If you’ve applied a preset to an image and you notice one of the colors no longer fits your vision for the edit, you can go into the HSL Panel and adjust it until it looks “right”, or looks good to your eye.

For example, let’s say you’ve applied a preset and almost every color looks great and you love the mood— except the yellows don’t look the way you want them to. You can go into HSL and adjust the Yellows (possibly also the Oranges or Greens, depending which side of the spectrum your yellow colors fall on) until they look perfect to you!

Making adjustments to the HSL in an image is a great way to make sure photos for clients (especially weddings and branding photos) don’t alter the colors your clients picked out but you get to keep the mood or style you want with the preset! There’s nothing worse than editing a whole wedding gallery and having the bride reach out saying the bridesmaids dresses don’t look like the color they are in reality.

Using HSL for Correcting Skin Tones

When you run into an edit where the skin tone of your subject is too saturated, too dull, too green, too magenta, etc, HSL will be the quickest way to make global adjustments to your image. For example: if you have an image where the subject’s skin tone is showing way too orange, go to HSL and desaturate the Oranges in Saturation. You can also adjust the Orange Hue to be slightly more Red or more Yellow if you’re noticing something like a sunburn or sallowness in the skintone.

In this image example, the subject is lacking color in the skin, which is corrected by adding more Orange Saturation and darkening the Orange Luminance.

Our Archipelago Edits: Greens live stream goes over lots of tips for dealing with greens and green cast in photos, and there’s a portrait edit at 22:50 showing how to counter green casts in skin using Hue and Masks!

Black and White Edits

The HSL panel plays a role even in black and white edits— the panel adjusts how each color is translated into shades of gray, so you can make different colors lighter or darker to alter the way they look in black and white.

*Image by* *Sarah Adler*
Edited with Quest 41 Raven

In this photo, the above image is with just the Raven 03 black and white preset applied, and the bottom two show differences in the Yellow and Green Luminance.

Our new Limited Release Chroma Presets feature a toolset with easy to use Color Shift presets that adjust the Red and Orange, Yellow and Green, Aqua and Blue, and Purple and Magenta tones without affecting the subject. These make it easy to make color adjustments to fine tune your edits without affecting the skin tones or subject of your photo!

Learn more about Chroma

There are more Lightroom panels and sliders that you can use to edit color in your photos! Which one should we do a deep dive on next?

HSL 101

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