We have a few tools that we can use to enhance our workflows in the 2023 Adobe MAX releases of Lightroom Classic and Lightroom. This article will teach you the basics of the Point Color tool that is available in all desktop versions. The HSL/Color Panel has been renamed Color Mixer to align it with the panel by the same name found in Lightroom. The controls of the old Color panel, which allowed you to adjust the hue, luminance, and saturation of a single colour (within a range of fixed colors), are now available via a dropdown menu on the Mixer tab.
It’s the Point Color panel, which allows for a much finer range of control. The HSL panel is unchanged and still very useful. What can Point Color do, that the HSL Panel cannot? Point Color has two main functions that set it apart from HSL. The first is that we can fine-tune the range of colors affected with high control. In contrast, each color specified in the HSL panel will affect a fixed range of colors.
Let’s look at some examples to see why this is so important. Point Color can be used as both a global adjustment that affects all colors in a photo simultaneously, and as a masking adjustment. Together, this means that HSL is useful if you’re happy to adjust the predetermined ranges of colors that each slider affects. But we now have an option that allows us more control in order to focus on a specific range of colours and make adjustments both locally and globally. We’ll look at a few examples to understand how it works.
Get Oriented
The Point Color panel is quite dull when you first open it, but once you click the Sample Spot Color tool (Eyedropper), and select the color that you wish to sample, the panel comes alive. Please note that I have expanded the triangles to show all of the options.
You’ll find a color swatch next to the eyedropper. As you change the color, the swatch changes to reflect both the original color selected and the new color. Below this is a large field of color displaying the chosen color (indicated by a black pin), within the ranges of hues which will be affected. A color bar is displayed below the color field. It shows a larger version of the selected colour (which also changes to display the original and the adjusted colour). A color rectangle is shown to the right of the field. It shows the selected colour within a range luminance values.
After selecting a color, you can adjust its hue, saturation and luminance by dragging the sliders for Hue Shift or Saturation Shift or moving the Luminance Shift slider. Dragging left or right in the color field changes the Hue Shift. Drag up or down within the color field to adjust the Sat. Shift. Drag the color rectangle up or down to adjust the Lum. Shift. You’ll be able to see the sliders moving together as you drag in the color area. Moving any slider will also result in a white circle moving in the color field corresponding to the change.
Put into Practice
Imagine I wanted to change the color of a young woman’s dress. It was a red that was very saturated. Instead, it would be a pink with a lower saturation. The Targeted adjustment tool on the Mixer tab could be used to try and shift the hue, luminance, and saturation towards a pinker color. However, because the original colour was so similar to her skin tones, the result would not be desirable. This tool does not allow you to limit the range of hues that are affected.
Reset the adjustments and switch back to the Point Color tool. I used the eyedropper tool to sample the dress color. The colors in the color field tell me I’m likely to have the same problem as before. Let’s try using the Range controls to limit the affected color range to avoid affecting the skin and lips. You can move the Range slider to the right to increase the range or to the left to reduce it. The Range disclosure triangle can be expanded to access finer controls for the hue, luminance, and saturation ranges I wish to adjust. It can be useful to check the Visualize Range option, which will change the colors of the range that is not affected to grayscale.
We can now clearly see the areas of her face and arms that will be affected by not limiting the range of colors.
The range is now dialed to only affect the dress. I can make the desired changes in color, saturation and luminance without affecting the skin.
This type of adjustment wasn’t possible with HSL alone because we couldn’t customize the ranges of colors that were affected. The color of the dress was close enough to her skin tones that I was able limit the range of colors affected by the adjustment. But Point Color has more power than just limiting range.
Point Colour in Masking
If you want to change only one color, what if it’s not possible to limit the range of colours, or if the same color is present in multiple places within the image? Point Color has another advantage over Mixer (HSL/Color), which is Masking. Double-clicking on the Point Color label in the top panel will reset/remove global Point Color adjustments. You can also right-click on a color swatch to choose the option of deleting the swatch or all swatches from the context menu.