AFFINITY PHOTO - PERFECT COLOURS
James Paterson enhances colours in Affinity with HSL
Bold colours can really help to make an image pop, whether on screen or in print. But the colours in a photo can come out disappointingly weak or lacking in punch. Thankfully, there are lots of ways to tease out the colour and give our images greater impact. One such tool is the HSL adjustment in Affinity Photo. HSL stands for Hue, Saturation and Luminosity. The tool gives us independent control over these three parameters. The Hue lets us shift a colour to something different, while the Saturation lets us control the intensity of the colour, and lastly the Luminance slider lets us adjust the brightness of colour ranges.
The great thing about the HSL tool in Affinity Photo is how we can fine-tune what is targeted. Six colour points let us target broad ranges like reds or blues, making it easy to zero in on the red petals here and adjust them. But we can also go beyond those six standard ranges and define our own by adjusting the colour wheel, so we can, for instance, ensure we pick up all the green and yellow colours in the plant here and boost them all at once. Whether you want to boost colours or shift them to something completely different, the HSL control can be very useful. In this project we’ll show you how to use it to recolour our flower image, then go on to target and colour the backdrop.
DOWNLOAD PROJECT FILES TO YOUR COMPUTER: http:// downloads.photoplusmag. com/pp218.zip
STEP BY STEP HSL MASTERCLASS
Control the Hue, Saturation and Luminosity of your colours
01 ADD AN HSL LAYER
Open the start.jpg image into Affinity Photo. Go to the Layers Panel, click the Adjustment icon and choose HSL. The six colour spots below the circle let you target different colour ranges. It’s set to target all colours but its power comes from choosing your own.
02 ALTER THE REDS
Click on the red spot then try dragging the Hue slider to alter the red range. If you need to reset any slider, double-click it. Next click on the green spot and drag the Hue slider to the left and the Saturation slider to the right to make the greens more intense.
03 FINE-TUNE THE RANGE
The green range doesn’t target all the colours we want here. We can adjust the four points on the colour wheel to fine-tune what is included or excluded. The outer points set the transition and th
