4 | LIGHTROOM
Claire Gillo shows you how to target and adjust individual colours with Lightroom’s amazing Color Mixer tool
The Color Mixer Panel in Lightroom provides an easy way to tone and style your images in a few easy steps. To use the Color Mixer, go to the Develop Module; you’ll find the Color Mixer Panel on the right-hand side, fourth tab down.
There are two main settings: the first is Mixer; the second is the newer part of the feature called Point Color. The Mixer tab has been designed to help you make general colour adjustments across the whole of the image, whereas Point Color is for more localised changes (see ‘Point Color’ below).
Three terms that appear throughout the Color Mixer Panel are Hue, Saturation and Luminance (HSL). Hue refers to the colour or tint; Saturation is the strength of the colour; and Luminance is the brightness.
In the Mixer tab, you can opt to adjust just one of the settings or all three. Have an experiment by pushing and pulling one of the Hue colour sliders and see what happens to your image. For example, in our cupcake photo, when we pushed the Red slider to the right, the cup cases changed to orange, and when we pushed it to the left, they went a deep magenta.
It’s easy to get carried away in the Color Mixer and to go too far. You really only want to use it to make subtle adjustments. For example, if the yellows in your image are too overpowering, you can reduce the saturation. If the tone of a colour is too weak or the wrong shade, you can adjust accordingly.
At any point in your edit if you’ve gone too far, you can reset the settings to take your image back to its original state. To do this, hold down Alt/Option on your keyboard and you’ll see the ta
