Fix general HSL behavior

Guys, what you describe is just how the HSL color model is supposed to work. HSL has 3 axis, hue, saturation and luminance. Pure colors in HSL are 100 % saturation and 50 % luminance. If you increase luminance to 100 % you get white, if you set it to 0 % you get black. Neutral grey by the way would be 50 % luminance and 0 % saturation. This is contrary to the HSV/ HSB model where pure colors are defined at 100 % luminance and you need to decrease saturation in order to brighten up colors. So how would they be able to change this behavior without switching to a completely different color model?

And concerning the green color of foliage, grass etc: These colors are usually a mixture of yellow and red with just some minor portions of green and maybe some cyan/ aquamarine depending on the whitebalance and lighting conditions. If you want to tweak the color of foliage and grass you mainly need to address the yellow and red sliders. This is nothing out of the ordinary and has been the same with all software I’ve used so far.

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This really is not how it works in other programs. Also what you’re describing isn’t even how DXO Photolab works. Go into any photo with a blue sky, turn up the lightness slider all the way up on all 6 color channels individually. The photo doesn’t even get that much lighter, it just completely loses all color saturation. According to what you describe the photo should be pure white after turning up all the knobs and losing all color. It’s not. Also according to what you describe the really light blue colors should still look blue when you turn the slider down low enough that dark blues become black. That doesn’t happen. All blues in the image become grey.

I think you need to go and actually check this in other software, because this is in no way, shape, or form common behavior for the luminosity in HSL modules. I just tested out 4 other programs for this right now, including raw editors ACR and DPP and 2 phone apps. NOT ONE exhibits this behavior. I turn down the luminosity of the sky, the sky still looks blue, just darker. This is a very common edit for landscape photographers who forgot to bring a GND filter or couldn’t use one due to the a horizon that’s too uneven. Literally everyone does this. A luminosity adjustment in a narrow band color range should not have a strong effect on saturation until you hit extremes, as each channel in RGB should have it’s value lowered relative to one another instead of “averaging” their values to single value, but simply testing out other software should illuminate that this is non-standard behavior that hampers usability of the HSL module relative to most other software.

Tested all 4 programs to see if adjusting yellow effects greens too. Nope. The color gamut on green is obviously way different in PhotoLab. Another user just posted that, like me, they don’t really use HSL in Photolab because of this. It’s a problem.

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@sgospodarenko … It would be helpful to have some DxO Staff input to this - ideally, as an explanation of how the HSL tool is applied in PhotoLab.

eg. See above for interpretations by @the_digi_picture_com and @Timedog - - which of these is correct? … is there an issue here?

John M

I tested this yesterday with a photo which had a lot of green in it (all sorts of green, from dull to bright, grass, boat, tent, …) and the green slider did almost nothing. Also the light blue sky was not touched by the blue slider. Even stranger, the blue sky was also almost untouched if i select ‘All’ in the HSL dropdown and push up the saturation to the max. Doing this with the ‘normal’ stauration slider would add saturation to the sky.
I will try to repeat the tests on t he green photo in some other programs to see what the result is, but i guess dxo needs to look into this.

Arend

Hello,

Yep, agree. Let’s ask @Benoit or @baobao to explain.

Thank you
Regards,
Svetlana G.

Sometimes, depending on the photo, the cyan sliders will have more affect on the sky than blue sliders.

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Ultimate HSL functionality would be achieved if the position and width of the sliders could be adjusted. Such tools exist out there and most of them don’t work too well… Maybe that DxO could bring us an industry leading tool in the future :wink::+1::+1::+1:

I think the colors are split too eagerly, without any overlap (or even gaps??). If we could set the ‘overlap’ with a slider that would help alot with the confusion (I think that was what you meant??).
I found that in other software (on1 in this case) the green silder and the yellow slider have an overlap, but it is a fixed overlap and maybe not what everyone wants/needs

Arend

This feature request completely makes sense. HSL tool in OpticsPro (and now Photolab) is there - unchanged - for quite a long time, and was originally designed at customer request to behave like original Hue\Saturation tool from Photoshop (i don’t talk about more recent Hue\Saturation tool from CameraRaw, which behaves differently). The observed behavior is inherited from it: selecting Green Hue range in Photoshop tool doesn’t impact that much grass, increasing lightness tends to desaturate color, etc.

So it’s true that we could make it much more customizable (in fact Photoshop original tool already enables to customize hue ranges) and intuitive (green behavior, impact on saturation when changing lightness, etc.).

So if you’re interested in a big refresh of this tool, go vote for @Timedog suggestion!

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I agree with your experience with the green slider, but I cannot agree with you about the blue slider’s effect on the sky. It had a very strong effect on the sky in several images I tried it on when I increased/decreased saturation and/or Lightness. I suspect the results may differ depending upon the amount of blue vs cyan in any particular image.

Mark

HSL Tool and other color control tools are mostly not responding to my thoughts but more to my noob skilled hands ending up with a sort off better image but not what i originally wanted.
So i stay often away of this tools avoiding to be cut. :smile:
Stil voted yes because any Big Refresh is a good thing because its reviewed against this time of use.

If you on this subject is there also some presets involved like:
Sunset emphasise
Bluesky Emphasise
nature green Emphasise
one point color (al doh that’s morelike a filtermask effect) (you know: the red rose in a black and white image trick)
(lets say the kind of scenery emphasises you can have on a camera shooting jpeg)

That kind of support would safe us plane shooters a lot of work trying to work around the ooc-jpeg using raw and accomplish the same in pp. :sweat_smile:

I virtually never use this function as it never seems to do what I want as per others experiences. If I have colours issues I usually do it in Capture One, probably the best colour editor I have used especially coupled with the masking… So if DxO was to improve this function :smile:

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@Leon > Hi Leon. Could you tell us more about what you were expecting with the controls as they’re now, and have been deceived with?

Regarding C1Pro (and besides the masking option from the selected color range) I’d be glad to have your take on what you exactly perceive as the best features regarding their color editing:

  • The color wheel approach? The color range display ?
  • Their Skintones dedicated feature ? The uniformity setting?
  • Their overall color rendering?

Thanks in advance.

Hi fdeitos!

I rarely use the skintone section, or the basic section in CP1 colour editor. I use the advanced colour selection because it allows me to select any colour I want and adjust the range of that selected colour - this way I am not limited to pre-defined colours such as in PL or Lightroom (which has more to pick from the PL). I can then adjust them any way I like with very fine control. The fact that I can then take that colour selection and turn it into a mask is pretty nice too.

As to what I don’t like in PL (and of course as mentioned above it hasn’t changed for a long time and there is a limited number of colours to adjust which rarely match the colours I want to change. I don’t have an issue with PL colour rendering, (I do with Lightroom!) and of course CP1 is very nice too. I guess this can come down to speed, the faster I can get the result I want in one software package, the better.

Thank you for your detailed answer. :slightly_smiling_face:

As we’re thinking on how to address HSL improvements, what solution to implement, if we change things and how much we intend to change them…that will feed our thoughts!

I think the first things is to make the colour selectable instead of preset colours. Then being able to adjust to hue, saturation and luminance would be a good start.

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If you make the source color selectable, you could create a number of adjustment settings that is equal to the number of supported colors, so 16,7 mio at least, if you shift each color for example like that:

#FF000000 -> #FF000001
#FF000001 -> #FF000002

And even if you limit the number of allowed color shifts to a reasonable number, how are the color shifts managed in C1? Is there something like a list of color shifts, so that the user can delete one of many afterwards or adapt an existing one?

C1 keeps a list of each selected colour in the colour section and each can be re-adjusted independently of the others, turn on and off or deleted. How it works is best shown in a video:

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Hi everyone.

This request has been taken into account and the enchancing of the HSL part of our Backlog now.
I’ll close this topic to free votes!

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions :wink:

Best regards,
Fabrizio

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