The way HSL works in Photo Lab doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s unlike every other editor I’ve used. It’s borderline unusable. There are 3 main issues with the implementation of HSL in PhotoLab:
For some reason almost nothing ever registers as “green” on the green hsl slider. All of my landscape photos involving trees aren’t affected very much by using this slider. The yellow slider affects both yellow, and almost all shades of green as well! I’m GUESSING this could be brought about by using the same algorithm between SRGB and AdobeRGB modes, since SRGB has a limited green gamut compared to adobe. If that is the case, you need to change your algorithm to work differently for the SRGB gamut. Or maybe it was designed by someone with mild color blindness to certain colors? Some of the other 5 colors seem a little off too, but green is by far the worst. Whatever is causing this, it needs to be changed as soon as possible.
The “Lightness” slider affects saturation!!! If I turn down the lightness on a blue sky, the sky becomes grey, instead of a darker shade of blue! We already have a saturation slider directly above the lightness slider, let me control saturation! There’s no reason why “lightness” should also affect saturation. It seems like the code for the “Channel Mixer for black and white” slider was copy/pasted into the HSL module, and someone forgot to make changes before shipping the product. “Lightness” and “Channel Mixer for Black and White” seem to do exactly the same thing, making them redundant.
We need 8 colors in HSL. If you can fix the problems I’ve listed above, then give us 8 colors instead of 6, I won’t have to go into other programs to do color correction.
There is already a thread for #3, but I thought #1 and #2 were just as important to having a usable HSL module. There’s the obivous issue of backwards compatibility with older files, but you could always do what Adobe does and have a dropdown menu that allows you to choose the old or new version of the module. Old photos that have already been edited would default to the old version of the HSL module. Please comment if you are noticing these same issues!
I can see that you’re passionate about this issue, as you see it - and that’s probably why you’re applying some mild sarcasm to your points - but I can vouch for the seriousness with which DxO staff monitor, and respond to, this forum … so, perhaps best to win us over simply by the power of your argument.
Note: You can vote for your suggestion/request using the button at top-left of this thread … This will encourage others to vote to support your proposal.
The parts you quoted weren’t meant to be mean or sarcastic. I’m a programmer and I’ve had friends and family with mild colorblindness.
I can’t see how the lightness slider issue isn’t a programming mistake or bug, because as stated “lightness” and “color mixer for black and white” seem to work precisely the same, yet one them is part of a paid upgrade. It literally seems to be copy and pasted code. It could be a mistake no one on the team noticed because no one has notified them of the issue.I haven’t seen any posts here about it.
I’m not sure this is really that easy (although it should be fixed). I was evaluating dxo and capture one (i went for dxo obviously) and capture one makes a big deal out of color brightness/saturation, that they do this correct (as opposed to the competition, but that’s their word )
I do agree that the green slider is sometimes not really green. (have to check the other colors)
I have noticed #1 as well, and that’s the reason I do not use HSL. I have not noticed #2, but the way you describe it sounds like a clear bug to me. Why did you put it here under suggestions, instead of filing it as a bug?
The easiest way to see this is to go to a picture with a blue sky in it and adjust lightness. If you turn it up or down the sky gets lighter and darker, but loses the blue tone and instead turns grey. I want others to test it out and make sure it’s not an error in my installation (although I’ve reinstalled and updated the program several times and this issue has always been there).
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
@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?
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.
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