Photoshop Just Changed Hue-Saturation! – What You Need to Know

With a pixel layer selected and the contextual taskbar enabled, you will see the Adjust Colors button. Clicking this button will create a hue and saturation adjustment layer, which includes a new bar displaying the six most prominent colors in your image. By selecting one of these color swatches, you can adjust its hue, saturation, and lightness, thereby altering every instance of that color throughout the image. My name is Jesus Ramirez, and in this video, you'll learn everything you need to know about the new hue and saturation adjustment layer in Photoshop. To follow along, make sure you are in the latest Photoshop beta, currently version 26.6.0. The biggest change in this recent update is the replacement of the traditional Adjust dropdown with these intuitive color swatches. The color swatches displayed depend on how you create the hue and saturation adjustment layer. Creating it from the taskbar displays the most prominent colors in the image, while creating it from the new adjustment layer icon shows the primary RGB and CMYK colors, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow. And the swatch on the far left controls all the colors at the same time. No matter how you created the hue and saturation adjustment layer, you can always go into the preset dropdown and choose between default and prominent colors. After selecting a swatch, simply drag the hue, saturation, and lightness sliders to fine-tune your color. Changes are previewed in real-time, with the swatch split in two to show before and after. Left for original color, right for the result. If the prominent color you want isn't shown in the list of six, click on a swatch you want to replace, then you can use the On Image Adjustment tool to select the color. Instead, I prefer to use the eyedropper in the taskbar because it shows you a preview of the color you select, but the taskbar is currently showing us tools to edit the mask. That's because the focus, the white outline, is on the layer mask. When you click on the adjustment layer thumbnail, you will see the white outline around it, and the taskbar will show the properties for this adjustment layer, including the eyedropper. Enable it, and click and hold as you drag to see a loop display in the sampled color. Once you release, the selected color will replace the color swatch, notice how it's now blue. At this point, you can make any adjustments you want to the new selected color. Now let me show you three practical applications of this tool, and a trick you probably haven't seen anywhere else. Make sure to like and subscribe if you learned something new. In this first example, I'll show you how to change the color of a shirt and how to solve a common pitfall. To start, I'm going to click on the adjust colors button in the taskbar, which will give me the prominent colors of the image. So now we need to click on the color swatch that more closely resembles a shirt, and we have two. We have this one and this one. Notice that when I click on these, the hue slider shows you the color that we select. They're basically the same, not too different. When you click on the other swatches, you will see more of a difference in the selected colors. But for the shirt, either of these color swatches will work, and we'll also edit the target colors so it makes no difference which of the two you select. One important thing to note is the hue selector at the bottom. This controls the colors we're adjusting. The colors that will completely change are found between the two vertical lines. In this case, the reds. And the colors that will have a smooth fall off and not completely change are between the vertical line and the triangles on either side. Next, you can drag the hue slider to the right to make the shirt cyan. Also notice the before and after gradients. The gradient on top shows the original colors, and the gradient on the bottom shows how the colors in the image were affected. The original red on top, and the cyan we applied at the bottom. But notice that we're also affecting his skin tones in other areas of the image. Why is this happening? Well, no matter the ethnicity, skin tones are always found in the oranges. Which are right here, and they're being affected by the fall off. So we need to fix that. I recommend starting by dragging the right vertical slider to the left up until the point before the shirt changes colors. So I'm going to click and drag this over to the left. At this point, the shirt is affected, so I'm just going to go back a little bit. Right about here. So we can say that from this point over to the left, that's where the shirt is being affected. So anything to the right of that doesn't really need this adjustment. So I can take the fall off triangle on the right side and drag it to the left. See that? See how we're no longer affecting his skin tones? And now I can do the same thing on the other side. I'm going to click on the left vertical icon, and I'm going to drag it to the right until the shirt is affected. Once the shirt starts changing colors, you've gone too far. So go back a bit. So in this case, right about here, it looks like I'm no longer affecting the shirt or any other area of the image. And I can drag the left triangle fall off slider to the right. And this looks fantastic. This adjustment layer is now only affecting the shirt and nothing else in the image. By the way, if you want to make the shirt black or white, then drag the saturation slider all the way to the left. So we have no saturation in those colors. And then you can drag that lightness slider to the right to make the shirt white or all the way to the left to make it black. Now in this case, this particular shirt is not completely black, it's gray. So we are going to have to make those pixels darker. How do we make them darker? Well, we need to use a layer mask for that. But luckily in the Photoshop beta, we have some great options to do that. What I'm going to do first is disable this adjustment layer just so that I'm working with the original image because there's more contrast between the red shirt and everything else. Then I'm going to go into the object selection tool and from the select people dropdown, I'm going to select the man that we're working with and I'm going to choose upper clothes and that selects the shirt. I'll click on apply and we have a selection around the red shirt. What I'm going to do now is enable the hue and saturation adjustment layer and press control G on Windows, command G on the Mac to put this layer into a group. And I'm going to apply that selection as a layer mask to the group by clicking on the new layer mask icon. Now, anything that I put into that group will only affect the shirt. So I can go in there and create a levels adjustment layer and I can use the levels adjustment layer to control the darkness of that shirt and try to make it as dark as possible. Next, let me show you how we can use the colorize feature and blending modes to make these jeans a darker blue. I'm going to start by using the adjust colors button and notice that none of the prominent colors are blue. So I'll click on one of the colors, then use the eyedropper tool and click on her pants and now we have that color here. Unfortunately, if I make an adjustment and I'll make an extreme one so that you can see, we will not be able to only select the jeans. No matter how I adjust these sliders, it's going to be very difficult to only target the jeans. And that's because we have a lot of shades of blue, grays and whites that are just too difficult to select by using these sliders. So instead, let me show you this technique. I'm going to click on this icon to reset the adjustment layer. Then I'm going to right click on the layer mask and delete it. And we're going to use a similar technique as we did a moment ago. I'm going to go into the object selection tool. Then under the select people dropdown, I'm going to click on her face and choose lower clothes and click on apply. That will create a selection around her pants. Next, I'll click on the new layer mask icon to create a mask that targets the jeans. I'll click on the adjustment layer thumbnail and I'm going to click on colorize, which will map the selected color to the entire image. But since we have a layer mask, it's only applying it to the jeans. So now I can use the hue slider to select a blue that I like and use the saturation and lightness sliders to get the look that I want. One of the advantages of using adjustment layers is that we can also apply a blending mode. In this case, I can choose multiply to apply a more realistic result. Let me show you the difference. This is multiply and this is normal. See that multiply makes things a little bit darker. And in this case, it works better. And of course, you can continue adjusting the saturation, hue and lightness to get the look that you want. Now, let me show you a trick with the hue and saturation adjustment layer that I rarely see anyone use. The goal here is to desaturate everything except the yellow jerseys. To do so, I'm going to create a new hue and saturation adjustment layer from the new adjustment layer icon. Then I'll click on the yellow color swatch. And as you can see from the hue selector in the before and after gradients, we are targeting the yellows in the image. And of course, if you drag the saturation slider to the left, the yellow jerseys will desaturate. But we want the opposite. We want the jerseys to remain yellow and desaturate everything else. Remember what we talked about earlier? The colors in between these vertical sliders are affected by the controls above. And the colors past the triangles are not. So we need to invert these sliders so that the triangles are where the vertical sliders are. And how do we do that? Well, you can click in between the two vertical sliders and drag to the right to move all four at the same time. Once you get past the end, the two sliders will come through on the other side. And now we can drag both the triangle sliders to about where the yellow is so that the saturation adjustment doesn't affect it. To do so, you can click here in the middle and drag to the right and notice how everything starts becoming desaturated. You can also see the before and after gradients here. See how all these colors are now grayed out. And keep dragging until the shirt starts desaturating. Go back a bit and do the same thing on the other side. Click and drag from the center in between the vertical and triangle sliders and move it to the left. And when the shirt starts desaturating, stop and go back a bit. Right about here. And be careful not to push the other sliders over like I just did here. But no worries, this still works. Now you can close the gap between the triangle and vertical sliders to make sure we only target the colors found in the jersey. Looks like I need to move the triangles as well. The skin tones are still showing. So this adjustment will require just a bit more work. And this looks fantastic. Now this adjustment layer is desaturating everything but the yellow jersey. And if you want to change the color of the jersey, what you can do is create another hue and saturation adjustment layer. Target the yellows and drag the hue slider to get the new color you want. I should also mention that if you go into image, adjustments and hue and saturation, this dialog box contains the old legacy dropdown. It does not have the new color swatches. At the moment, they're only available through the adjustment layer. Again, my name is Jesus Ramirez. Like and subscribe if you learned something new.