How to Use the HSL Panel in Lightroom

Have you continually skipped over the HSL panel in Adobe Lightroom? As your editing technique develops, the ability to control color in your image becomes increasingly important. This tutorial will teach you how to use the panel to manipulate individual colors in Lightroom.

Lightroom offers several options beyond basic color correction and cropping. When you advance your skills to the point of breaking out of the Basics panel, you will find that you can perform the majority of your needed edits in this software. Lucy Martin delivers an excellent tutorial that covers one of these advanced areas of Lightroom: the HSL panel. HSL is an abbreviation for hue, saturation, and luminance. Understanding each of these gives you the ability to adjust the unique colors of your image.

In her video, Martin adjusts several different colors as she takes what she considered a throwaway photo and uses the HSL panel to create a quality image. She starts with the basics of manipulating the reds and oranges to get the skin tone right. She then has a plan to have the contrasting colors of orange and blue stand out in the image, and she walks through the steps to manipulate those specific colors to achieve her goal. Lastly, she teaches how to use the graduated and radial filters to further enhance the colors in the image.

The HSL panel gives you the kind of control that is needed to fix oversaturated colors, make areas of an image stand out, and give you ownership over the style of your image. This is an excellent tutorial for anyone who is ready to break out of the basics of editing in Lightroom and learn more about color manipulation.

Levi Keplar's picture

Levi Keplar is a wedding and portrait photographer and educator. He currently owns and operates his studio, Katie & Levi Photography, with his wife and is based in the Wichita, Kansas area. He has a passion for both the technical and the business sides of photography and helping others to grow in those areas as well.

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1 Comment

Very helpful information but for me a tortuous delivery. I just watched a different FS video by Chelsea Nicole and she could have covered this in 90 seconds. But that's just my preference -- the information here was still useful and appreciated.