EditColor (HSL)

Color (HSL)

Every editing tool slices a photo a different way and lets you target your edits to those slices. Curves works on tonal regions; the Color tool works on individual colors — and that's the most granular slice of all. If Curves is the backbone of a look, Color is its soul: it's how you make a blue sky bluer or shift it toward teal, calm a background that's stealing attention, fix a color cast from bad lighting, or build the film-like palettes that give a preset its character.

You'll find it as Color in the Edit view toolbar. Pick one of eight channels — red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, magenta — or tap the picker and touch a color directly in your photo to jump to its channel. Each channel gives you three sliders: Hue shifts that color toward its neighbors, Saturation sets its intensity, and Luminance makes it brighter or darker.

The Color (HSL) tool in Darkroom showing the eight color channels and Hue, Saturation, and Luminance sliders
Eight color channels, each with its own Hue, Saturation, and Luminance — here the sky's blues are pulled down to put more focus on the landscape.

Guiding the viewer's eye

Saturation and luminance are quietly powerful for directing attention. Shot a portrait where the green trees behind your subject pull the eye away? Drop their saturation and luminance and the background recedes, leaving your subject in focus. The same move works in reverse — lift the saturation and luminance of the color you do want to feature.

In landscapes, this is often easier than fighting with Curves. Ask how blue you want the sky: desaturating it darkens the mood and shifts weight to the ground, while raising its luminance separates a sky and foreground that sit in the same tonal range and would otherwise be hard to pull apart.

Hue: corrective and creative

A hue shift does two jobs. Correctively, it fixes a color that went wrong under tricky lighting or white balance. Creatively, even a subtle nudge can change the entire emotion of a photo — shifting greens toward yellow for late-summer warmth, or blues toward teal for a cinematic feel. Big shifts cross over into neighboring colors and look unnatural, so make small moves and watch the edges where two colors meet.

A word on skin: skin tones live in the orange and red channels. They're the easiest thing to ruin and the first thing a viewer notices, so treat those channels gently — small saturation and luminance changes, minimal hue.

Building film-like looks

Shifting colors across the spectrum is exactly how film stocks earned their signatures, and how the old cross-processing look — running film through the "wrong" chemistry — produced its unpredictable, beloved color shifts. The Color tool is your route to those palettes. A useful habit: play with the neighboring channel. An object's color is often a blend, so desaturating cyan (between blue and green) can change a sky in ways the blue channel alone won't. Once you land a palette you love, save it as a preset.

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