Did you know that Photoshop has a really powerful filter
that allows you to separate hue saturation
and brightness from your photos?
This technique allows you to create powerful masks
that allow you to enhance your images
in ways you never thought possible.
Check out how you can use this little known filter to enhance your photos.
Hi, I'm Jesus Ramirez from the Photoshop Training Channel.
In this video, I'm going to show you the power of the HSB/HSL filter in Photoshop.
We're going to learn how to create saturation mask so that we can enhance the colors of
this photo.
If you're new to the channel, then make sure that you click on that subscribe and notification
buttons now so that you don't miss any new Photoshop tutorials.
Also, make sure that you watch this video until the very end because there's going to
be a lot of information that you don't want to miss.
Alright, let's get right to it.
The filter that we're going to use today will place the hue, saturation, and luminosity
of an image into several channels, which means that you can create adjustment layers to target
them individually.
Now, I know that this sounds very confusing, but let me explain what it all means and why
it is beneficial for you in your workflow.
First, I'll briefly explain RGB.
RGB is an additive color model that mixes red, green, and blue light at various intensities
to create all the colors that you see in an image.
This color model is used in all screen devices like your computer, tablet, TV, or cellphone.
And the image that you're working with now is probably on the RGB color mode.
If you look at your document tab in Photoshop,
you will see the color mode, RGB, in this case.
It could also be CMYK or LAB, among others.
If you click on the Channels panel, you will see each of the RGB lights represented as
a channel, red, green, and blue.
These black and white images represent how much light there is on a channel.
White represents a lot of light, and black represents very little light in the color
of that channel.
RGB values range from zero, which is no light, or black to 255, which is light at the highest
intensity or white.
By mixing these three channels at different intensities, you will get the resulting RGB
image, which is the photo that you're working with.
These RGB channels could be used as selections.
For example, I could hold Ctrl on Windows, Command on the Mac and click on any other
channel thumbnails to load them as a selection.
For example, I'll click on the red thumbnail while holding control.
That's Command on the Mac.
And I will load the light of that channel as a selection.
Notice that the marching ants are selecting the brightest areas of the image.
Press Ctrl D on Windows, Command D on the Mac to deselect.
And next, let's talk about the three components that create colors.
If I double click on the foreground color picker and click and drag over these colors,
you will see that the RGB values adjust accordingly
from zero to 255.
But, you will also see the three components that make up the color that I selected.
HSB.
Hue, which is the color
measure in degrees from zero to 359.
Saturation is the intensity of that color.
Measure in percentages from zero to 100.
And brightness determines how bright or how dark the color is also measured in percentage.
In Photoshop, we can use filters to separate each of these components as channels, and
we can use layer mass to target individual components with adjustment layers.
One common technique is to use a saturation mask to target the saturation in your photos
as you adjust it.
Let me show you how that works.
First, I'm going to go back into the layers panel,
and I'm going to duplicate my background layer here.
I'll press Ctrl J on Windows, Command J on the Mac to duplicate.
And what I'm going to do is go into filter, other, HSB and HSL.
And by the way, if you don't have this filter installed in Photoshop, no worries, let me
show you how to install it now.
If you have Photoshop CS5, this is the link that you will need to go to.
I'll place the link to it down below in the description, and you can scroll down and you
will see that one of the plugins that is available in this download is the HSB/HSL adjustment.
So, you just need to select either the Mac or Windows version of Photoshop that you have.
If you're in Photoshop 2019 and earlier, this is where you can download the plugin.
Again, I'll place this link down below in the description, but you will see that you
can come into this section and download the file for the HSB or HSL filter and you can
install it for the Mac, Photoshop CC 2019, Photoshop CC 2019 and earlier for the 64-bit
or 32-bit version of Windows.
Also, in this page, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll see a brief description
of how this filter works.
And obviously, this is what this tutorial is all about.
Once you have the filter installed, you'll see
this window and you have two options,
input and row order.
First, the input is what is the current input of the layer that you're loading, an RGB,
HSB, or HSL.
In this case, we're working with an RGB image.
And what do we want to convert it to?
HSB, hue, saturation and brightness, or HSL, hue, saturation and lightness.
I'll explain the differences in a moment.
But first, let me just select HSB and press okay.
This will create this image that looks really, really groovy.
And what Photoshop is doing now is it's separating the hue, the saturation, and the brightness
into channels.
So, when I click into the channels panel, you'll see that the red channel contains the
hue information.
If you remember, hue is measured in degrees ranging from zero to 359.
A hue of zero degrees will appear as black on this representation, and a hue of 359 will
appear as white in this representation.
And of course, everything else in between will be different shades of gray.
Then we have the green channel, which contains the saturation information.
Saturation is measured from zero to 100.
Zero will appear as black, and 100 will appear as white, and everything in between will be
different shades of gray.
And in the blue channel, you will see the brightness information.
This is probably the easiest one to understand.
White is white and black is black, and all the grays in between represent the grays in
between black and white.
Now, Photoshop still thinks that this is an RGB image, so when you blend all these together,
you get that funky looking image.
But in reality, we're visualizing the hue, saturation, and brightness with these channels.
So, I'll click on RGB.
Then I'll go back into the layers panel and I'll disable this layer.
But before I do that, let me rename it, and I'll call it hue, saturation, and brightness, HSB.
I'll disable it, and I'll click on the background layer and press Ctrl J.
Command J on the Mac again to duplicate the layer.
And this time, I'll call this layer HSL, hue saturation and lightness.
And then I'll go back into the filter menu, and here's a trick for you.
The last filter that you use will always appear on top, but if I select it now, it will apply
the filter with the previous settings.
If you want to be able to edit the settings, hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac and
click, and it will bring up the last filter that you use with its settings.
So, we use hue and saturation and brightness before.
Now, we're going to You use hue, saturation, and lightness.
I'm going to click on that and I'm going to press OK.
And that's going to create an image that separated hue, saturation and lightness into channels.
Just like before, the red channel represents the hue.
The green channel represents the saturation, but it's a little different.
And the blue channel represents the lightness.
Now, let me briefly explain the difference between brightness and lightness.
And for that, we're going to use this color picker found on figma.
com is an online designer app.
And the reason that I'm using this instead of Photoshop is because Photoshop doesn't
have a HSL color picker.
So from here, I can select RGB, HSL, and HSB.
Let's start with HSB.
So, first of all, disregard the second bar and the 100% here at the end.
This controls the opacity and does not what we're dealing with in this example.
The bar on top controls the hue and degrees, as we explained earlier.
For example, a hue of 60 will get me into the yellows, and a saturation of 100 will
give me true yellow.
Left means less saturation.
Right means more saturation.
How intense the color is.
The intensity of the color.
And then brightness is pretty self-explanatory.
You drag down; it gets darker.
You drag up; it gets brighter.
Also, to have a color at its maximum saturation at its maximum intensity, I need 100% brightness.
Another thing to note is that the only way to get white is if you have 100% brightness
and 0% saturation.
The hue is really not that important to get white.
Now, let me reset this back to zero to get red, and I'll increase the saturation to 100
just to get a pure red.
And if I switch over into HSL, you'll notice that the hue is the same.
I can adjust it the same as I did with HSB.
But now, look at where the most highly saturated version of this color is.
It's right here.
Right in the center with a lightness of 50.
So, with HSL, you need 50% lightness to get the most intense color.
Anything more than that will make the color brighter, and anything less than that will
make the color darker.
So, that is very important to keep in mind in the example that we're going to work on.
If I go over to the left, I obviously desaturate the image.
And you can see the lightness at 50% here in the background.
Also, another thing to notice; in this case, black is the opposite of white.
See that?
If I'm at black and then drag up to go to the opposite side, I get white.
With HSB, black is not the opposite of white.
So, that's something to keep in mind.
So, I'm going to go back into Photoshop, and we're going to work with this graphic really
quick and I have two layers, the HSB and HSL.
And these boxes are obviously different colors, and the hue saturation and brightness is represented
below each box.
And if I go into the HSB layer, go into Filter, hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac, and
click on the first option to bring up the last filter that I use with options.
I can select the HSB option and press, OK.
I'll do the same thing with this layer, but I will select the HSL option this time.
And I'm going to click on the channels panel and drag it out so that we can see it right
next to the Layers panel so that it's easier to work with.
So first, let's disable the HSL and look at the HSB.
The red channel shows the hue, so a hue of zero degrees will be black, and the hue of
360 will be white.
We don't have 360 here, but we have 320 and you can see that it's much brighter.
So, from black to white, depending on the degree value of the hue.
Then we have saturation.
So, look at this, all these colors are 100% saturation.
See that?
So, they're going to show as white, of course.
We had 0% saturation like I do in the background, it will show as black in this representation
of saturation.
And then what do you think the brightness will look like?
Well, pretty much as you would expect.
Brightness of 100% shows as white.
And something that will be brightness of zero will be black.
And the different levels of brightness will show different levels of gray.
I think that's pretty self-explanatory.
But now, let's compare that to lightness.
Once I enable lightness, something very different is going to happen.
Notice that the boxes are no longer white.
Why not?
Well, first, let's figure out what color they are.
I'm going to select the color picker and I'm going to click on the color there.
And if I double click on the foreground, you'll see that, that's 50% brightness.
That's a 50% gray.
But why is that?
Why is it white with HSB but 50% gray with HSL?
Well, if I go back into the Figma color picker and just go into RGB, and make sure that I
have a pure red, so to 55 for red and zero for the other two channels and go back into
HSL, you'll notice that the lightness is at.
See that?
50 right there, right on that gray.
So, if I bring down the saturation down to zero, you'll see that gray there.
And that's why you're going to see 50% gray in the representation of lightness for colors
that are at maximum saturation.
So, this is just a brief simplified explanation of the differences between HSB and HSL.
Hopefully this gives you an explanation as to why things may look different than what
you expect in the different channels with HSL and HSB.
I'm going to go back into our working document.
And from here, I'm going to click on RGB.
Go back into the Layers panel and I'm going To disable HSL, and we're going to work with
HSB simply because in my head, it's a lot easier for me to figure out what to expect
from each channel component.
But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use HSL.
It just means that I know what to expect, and I generally prefer using that mode for
creating mask that are going to be used on adjustment layers.
And I'm going to go into the channels panel again.
And remember, the red channel now contains the hue information.
The green channel contains the saturation information, and the blue channel contains
the brightness information.
If I want to select the saturation of this image, then I can hold Ctrl on Windows, Command
on the Mac and click on the channel thumbnail to load the most saturated areas of this photo
as a selection.
Then I'll click on RGB.
Go back into the layers panel and I can disable the HSB layer for now.
Go into my background layer and then I can create a hue and saturation adjustment layer
and the selection will become part of the layer mask of that adjustment layer.
So now, I'm targeting the saturated colors of this image.
If I increase the saturation, you'll notice that I'll saturate the image but I'm protecting
the colors that were not highly saturated.
So, let me hold Shift and then click on the layer mask thumbnail to disable it.
So, notice the difference.
This is how a regular huge and saturation adjustment layer will target the image.
It obviously oversaturates the image.
I'll hold Shift and click again to show you what it looks like with the layer mask.
So, if I hold Alt on Windows and click on the layer mask thumbnail, you will see what
that looks like.
So, anything that is bright is being saturated, because those were the saturated areas of
the image.
And anything that is Black has no saturation applied from the hue and saturation adjustment
later.
Let me hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac and click on the layer mask thumbnail
to bring back the original image.
So from here, you can now click on the hue and saturation adjustment layer thumbnail
and adjust the saturation accordingly in your image.
And the advantage of using this as a layer mask is that you could also paint with black
on areas that you don't want a lot of saturation in.
For example, her arm, it looks like her arm is highly saturated, so I can paint that away
by using black on the layer mask.
Like so, before and after.
I'm going to disable this layer and now I'm going to press Ctrl Alt and the number four.
That's Command Option and the number four on the Mac to load that same selection again.
Now, that keyboard shortcut is just a shortcut for the green channel.
See that?
Ctrl 4.
If I hold Alt, Ctrl and the number four, it will load the luminosity or brightness of
that channel.
So, you can just memorize those.
Ctrl Alt 2 for the luminosity of the entire image.
Ctrl Alt 3 for the red channel.
Ctrl Alt 4 from the green channel.
Ctrl Alt 5 for the blue channel.
So, I just use the Ctrl Alt 4 keyboard shortcut to load the green channel, which is essentially
the same thing as holding Ctrl or Command on the Mac and clicking on the channel thumbnail.
But anyway, so back in the layers panel, I'm going to create another hue and saturation
adjustment layer to show you how you can sort of create a custom made vibrance slider.
So, you might remember the vibrance lighter from the camera raw filter or from the adjustment
layer.
The vibrant slider is a smart way of adding saturation.
It protects already saturated pixels so that you can focus on applying saturation to pixels
with low saturation.
We can actually do the same thing with this saturation mask.
So, currently by default, the saturation mask is selecting the pixels that are highly saturated.
But if I invert the mask in the properties panel by clicking on this invert button, now
I'm targeting the pixels that don't have a lot of saturation.
So, I can click on the hue and saturation adjustment layer thumbnail, and I can increase
the saturation.
So now, I'm increasing the saturation only on pixels that don't have a lot of saturation.
Here's the before and after.
And again, I can paint with black on the layer mask to change that.
Also, since this is a layer mask, I can go into image, adjustment and levels and control
the luminosity of that layer mask, which will change what pixels I'm targeting.
So, if I make the layer mask darker, I only target the pixels with the lowest saturation.
If I make the layer mask brighter, then I target pixels that are more saturated.
So, in this case, I can adjust the layer mask accordingly so that I don't target too many
of the highly saturated pixels.
Press OK.
Go back into the hue and saturation adjustment layer and continue adjusting it accordingly.
As you can see, this is a really powerful technique that allows you to separate each
of the color components as channels.
And you can use those channels to create layer mask so that you can target a specific component.
Do me a favor.
If you enjoy this technique, click on that like button now and let me know how you plan
to use it.
Also, if this is your first time at the Photoshop Training Channel, then don't forget to click
on that subscribe and notification button so that you don't miss any new tutorials.
If you want to learn more about saturation, then check out my tutorial on saturation maps.
They're used for compositing and on the difference between vibrance and saturation.
I'm going to link to those videos down below in the description.
Make sure that you check them out right now.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll talk to you again in the next video.