Sketch Pad: Deke McLelland Dives Into Hue/Saturation in Photoshop

Deke McClelland is hands down one of the best Photoshop teachers out there! He has been giving advice on pretty much anything the program is capable of doing for well beyond a decade now, and goes out of his way to provide many of his tutorials online for free or very cheap. Some of his best tutorials are licensed with Lynda.com, above is an example on one that focuses on the hue/saturation adjustment tool in Photoshop.

Fellow graphic designers out there get your learn on!!

Cliffs notes-

Hue/saturation gives you independent control of specific color regions (reds, greens, yellows, magentas, cyans, and blues).

There are 3 sliders in the palette (see A in illustration below):
1. Lightness (rarely used as it doesn’t give you any control of tonal range, it either plugs up or washes out your image).
2. Saturation (controls the intensity of your color values)
3. Hue (lets you modify your colors ALL across the board)

You can Control/Command + click and drag over any spot on your image to quickly define a specific color range to apply your hue/saturation changes to.

When you are using this palette, inside an individual color channel (as opposed to master), you will notice two additional sliders at the bottom of the box. These sliders allow you to re-map the entire range of colors to an entirely different range of colors. (see B)

The bars BETWEEN the sliders at the bottom represent the range of colors on the top bar that are modified by the bottom bar (everything in dark grey between the bars); the triangular icons outside the bars on each side are “drop-off zones” (the lighter grey). These apply more gentler re-mappings of color from top bar to bottom. The longer these span, the subtler the transition. (see C)

When applying adjustments, it’s always recommended to use an adjustment layer so you can non-destructively mask out parts of the image you DON’T want to apply the modifications to!