Hue and Saturation for the Web

How to Adjust the Colors in Your Photos for the Online Viewing

May 7, 2007

Image before adjustment, Timothy Dzurilla

Bright colors are particularly important for online images. This tutorials will show how to maximize your photos for online viewing.

After you have cropped your image, adjusted the levels, and the curves, you will want to adjust the hue and saturation of your image to really make the colors pop out. This is particularly recommended for photography headed to the web because of how washed out digital photos can be to start with, but also because color is lost through file compression.

To Create a Hue/ Saturation Adjustment Layer

Like the levels adjustment layer it is possible to make this adjustment directly to your image through the Image menu, but it is preferable to create an adjustment layer so that changes can be made in the future, or so that you can limit the effect to specific parts of the image.

To add a hue/saturation adjustment layer:

1) At the bottom of the layers window, click on the icon that looks like a half white, half black circle.

2) Select Hue/Saturation.

3) You will see the adjustment layer appear above your image. If it is below, drag the layer to the top.

Adjusting Hue/Saturation

This adjustment layer is used to adjust the hue, saturation, and lightness of the colors in your photograph. It will not affect black and white the way that the levels and curves adjustments did.

With this adjustment layer, you can affect all of the colors at once (Master), or you can select a specific color range with the drop down menu. It is recommended to adjust each color separately, but in the interest of time, you may just want to adjust all of the colors at once.

Hue is the tint or color of your pixels. You can make your image more red or blue through this top slider.

Saturation is the amount of color displayed. With this slider you can increase the amount of color depicted. You can bring out the “blueness” of the sky, the “yellowness” of plants (plants seem to pop out more with yellow rather than green), or the “redness” of a ceremonial costume.

Lightness is how much black or white is in a certain color range. This slider is most useful for assessing where a certain color range is represented in a photo before adjusting saturation because the blacks and whites have been adjusted already though levels and curves.

This layer is complete personal preference. You can adjust your image as much or as little as you wish; it is simply a matter of playing around with the different colors and sliders.