PhotoLab 9 is first editing tool that I’ve used a lot.
I’m checking out 10 free trial to see if I will upgrade or wait a year and I’m trying to understand where Color Grading wheel fits into my Curves + HSL flow. There seems to be a lot of overlap between it and curves and just using it without understanding what to use it for will just cause a mess.
Is the main difference that Curves also control exposure? Like if I increase in highlights RGB I will keep same colors but increase overall brightness of highlights?
Depth mask seems very useful, but not sure if it’s worth upgrading just for that.
It’s an easier way to manipulate the colors. You can achieve the same with curves in addition with hls, but there are many more steps to do. For example if you would like to have the highlights more purple, with curves, you would have to select the blue channel, create a curve that only raises the brightness of the highlights, and do the same for the red curve. And possibly iterate several times, find the right curve points etc. you would also have to do the colour additions and subtractions in your head on how the rgb colors interact with each other. After that you would go to hls and fine tune the saturation of the purple.
With the color grading tool you can basically do all that in one to two steps.
On the other hand, HSL is much more local, in the sense that it only affects a specific colour range. Colour grading affects 3 zones, shadows, midtones and highlights .
For example, if you would like to make the scene appear to be more warmer, like on a sunset, you could use colour grading and move the highlights to a more yellow hue, and increasing their saturation.
If however, you would like to only make a person’s skin more warmer, without affecting other white tones in the picture, you would use the HSL tool to specifically change the saturation of orange tones.