If you want to spice up some bland photos or add some intense colours to one or even tone down some of the colours…then you need to spend some time playing with your hue and saturation.

hueandsat-example

First of all, let me define what each of them does.

Hue:
Adjusting the hue of your image is going to select certain colours and replace them with another colour or colour range as per your choice. For example: you can select all the reds in your image and replace them with blues. You can also choose to not select specific colours and rather adjust the entire image.

Saturation:
Saturation will adjust the intensity and weakness of the colours in your image. The slider for saturation ranges from grey scale to such an intense brightness of colour that your image looks completely artificial.

Both the hue and saturation can create such amazing effects in your photography and are definitely features you will want to play around with.

OK, so we begin by opening your image in Photoshop.
Set your workspace to default view (window/workspace/default workspace)

We will be working with the layers again. You will see with your image open that you have one ‘background’ layer which is your main image.

You now need to open a layer for your hue and saturation. Below your layers you will see a little circle that is half black and half white. Click that circle and select ‘hue and saturation’ from the list that appears.

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—>Here comes the fun part. A little box has opened on your screen. This little box is controlling your hue and saturation layer. The very top of the box is a drop down list. It is by default in ‘Master’ this means that you are playing with ALL the colours in your image. If you wanted to only focus on reds or blues etc then you would select them from that box. Leave it on Master for the sake of this lesson.

Below that is your Hue slider, your Saturation slider and a Lightness slider. The lightness slider will simply make your image darker or lighter.

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Here it is up to you to drag the various sliders to see exactly what effect they can have on your image. If you are going for something a little outer-worldish, then push your saturation.

This is the basics of hue and saturation. Play around with the Master setting and the other colours. Right at the bottom of your hue and saturation control box there are colour bars. The top bar are the colours in your image. The bottom bar shows what colour will be replacing the colour in your image. untitled

REMEMBER: if you want you image to keep it’s natural appeal then don’t go crazy with your hue and saturation settings. Rather just use them as a subtle tweak.

When you have the colours you want – click ok.

Now you want to save the file without losing your original image (you want to keep it incase there are other changes you want to make) If you click ‘save as’ now the program will automatically try and save the image as a .psd (a Photoshop file) because there is more than one layer making up the image. You need to tell the program to save it how you need it saved.
So you select ‘save as’ (file / save as) once you have selected where you want to save the file (desktop or my pictures or a folder you have made for your Photoshop images) you can select a name for your picture in the ‘file name’ box. Underneath that you find a ‘format’ box with a drop down list containing a number or options. Select the format you want to save you image in (the most common format would be jpeg)
Then simply hit the Save button.
If you get interrupted in the middle of your editing you can just hit save and leave the file in .psd format so that you can come back to it and continue editing in Photoshop at a later state. Once you have saved your file as a jpeg the layers will be merged.

example

The top image is a scanned in image of a film print taken on an old Minolta. The image below it is the manipulated version of the scan.