How to enhance colours in Affinity Photo – N-Photo 164 video tutorial

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Bold colours can really help to make an image pop, whether on screen or in print. But sometimes 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, the Saturation lets us control the intensity of the colour, and the Luminance lets us set the brightness.

One of the great things about the HSL tool is how it allows us to 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.

Even if you don’t want to change colours entirely, these techniques are extremely useful in allowing you to correct colours accurately so the photo matches reality.

Download the project file(s) to your Downloads folder

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James Paterson

The lead technique writer on Digital Camera MagazinePhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine and N-Photo: The Nikon Magazine, James is a fantastic general practice photographer with an enviable array of skills across every genre of photography. 

Whether it's flash photography techniques like stroboscopic portraits, astrophotography projects like photographing the Northern Lights, or turning sound into art by making paint dance on a set of speakers, James' tutorials and projects are as creative as they are enjoyable. 

He's also a wizard at the dark arts of Photoshop, Lightroom and Affinity Photo, and is capable of some genuine black magic in the digital darkroom, making him one of the leading authorities on photo editing software and techniques.  

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