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Dave's HSL Variants

Disciplines > Photography > Affinity Photo > Resources > Dave's HSL Variants

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Download

Click here to download the latest 'Dave's HSL Variants' macro set.

To insert this into your library, simply click on the 3-line 'hamburger' on the top right of the library panel, click on 'Import Macros...' and point it at the downloaded file. Then click on the layer for which you want a model and click once on the appropriate macro in the 'Dave's HSL Variants' library group category.

Discussion

The macros in this category are variants along the lines of HSL, perhaps adding something new for you to use. There are just two, but they are very useful. Both macros add a simple Procedural Texture adjustment to the top of the layer stack. Open them up and play with the sliders as described below.

Subtle HSL

Description

When you use HSL, it is so easy to push the sliders into positions where the picture looks awful. The basic idea of Subtle HSL is to give you a kinder, smarter HSL, that lets you push sliders to the limits and still come up with something useful. Just play with it! You'll get the gist pretty quickly.

Controls

• Calc: (0=Subtle; 1=Normal): Leave it on 0 for the subtle stuff. Switch to 1 to see what it would look like with full-strength HSL.

• Hue (non-linear): If you move the normal HSL slider even a little way off, you quickly get into weird, psychedelic stuff. This slider kind of expands the small-shift stuff to keep it useful.

• Saturation (preserve mono): When you change normal HSL saturation, everything goes grey or super-colourful. This version does the same for colours, but has increasingly less effect on pixels that are already close to being desaturated (including blacks, greys and whites).

• Luminosity (preserve colour): When you slide normal HSL luminosity down everything moves to black. When you slide it up, it all goes to white. This control kind of does the opposite of Saturation in that it preserves the more mid-tone, colourful pixels while darkening or lightening those already more dark and light.

Discussion

As with HSL, the most useful sliders are Saturation and Luminosity. Pushing these to the end limits will still leave you with a useful, coloured image.

The effect created is not huge (it's subtle!) but it is nevertheless significant. For example, you can darken an image by turning down Luminosity and perhaps Saturation too. And vice-versa for lightening it. This gives a quick way to do low-key and high-key images.

HWB

Description

HWB stands for Hue, Whiteness and Blackness. Each pixel has three ranges. Below the minimum value is the whiteness. Between the minimum and maximum is the hue. And above the maximum is the Blackness. Hence by snipping these three parts out, we can easily glue them together to get another way to adjust the pixels.

A way you can use this is to set a combination of Hue, Whiteness and Blackness, then adjust the three 'Keeps'

Controls

This macro lets you control Hue, Whiteness and Blackness, plus how the pixel values should respond when you increase or decrease each of these.

• Hue: The hue slider works like Hue in HSL, rotating pixel hue around the colour wheel.

• Whiteness: Increasing this increases whiteness, which is the value of the minimum of R, G and B (min(R,G,B)). It effectively makes the image more white. Decreasing it moves this white point down.

• Blackness: Increasing this increases blackness, which is the value of the gap between the maximum of R, G and B and 100% (=1-max(R,G,B)). It effectively makes the image more black. Decreasing it moves this black point downwards.

• Keep Chroma: Chroma is the gap between the minimum and maximum values of R, G and B (=max(R,G,B)-min(R,G,B)), which is effectively the saturation of each pixel. Keeping chroma seeks to sustain this gap rather than letting it being squeezed.

• Keep Blacks in Whiteness: Increasing whiteness can lead to blacks becoming grey as the black zone (from maximum(R,G,B) to 100%) is squeezed. Move the slider up to counteract this and sustain the black zone. Tip: it can be a useful move to slide it fully to the right and then slide it down to a satisfactory point.

• Keep Whites in Blackness: Increasing blackness can lead to whites becoming grey as the white zone (from 0 to minimum(R,G,B)) is squeezed. Move this slider up to counteract this and sustain the white zone. Tip: It can be a useful move to slide it fully to the right and then slide it down to a satisfactory point.

Discussion

With three zones (whiteness, hue, and blackness) to fit into 0 to 100%, when you stretch one, you have to squeeze the other two (and vice versa for moving the H, W or B sliders down).  This can be a surprisingly tricky problem that, unaddressed, can lead to rather displeasing visual effects. This is the purpose of the three 'Keep...' sliders, which effectively fights back on each of these zones.

In this:

• Whiteness goes from 0 to min(R,G,B).

• Hue/Chroma goes from min(R,G,B) to max(R,G,B).

• Blackness goes from max(R,G,B) to 100%.

See also

If you are having problems downloading the macros, click here to download as zip file.