The power of Point Colour

This new tool for Photoshop and Lightroom lets you fine-tune colours in your photos with precision

Point Color is a new feature in Lightroom and Camera Raw that allows for fine adjustments to colours. It works by allowing you to zero in on a specific colour range. As such, it's a bit like the Hue, Saturation and Luminosity controls in the Colour Mixer panel. But while these older tools only allow for adjustments to eight predefined colour ranges, with the new Point Color tool, you can be much more specific in defining your own range of colours to be adjusted. When you want to adjust something like the delicate range of reds and oranges in a sunset, the tool can work wonders.

Once you've targeted the range of colours you want to tweak, you can make changes to the Hue, Saturation and Luminosity of the range. The tool isn't really designed for making huge colour shifts and heavy edits, like changing red to green. Rather, its function is to make more subtle changes, perhaps to remove a blue colour cast from shadows or even out rough patches of colour. Here, it allows us to target the slightly insipid yellow tones in the lower part of the sunset sky and match the colours with the vibrant reds in the clouds above, then target and tweak the reflected colours in the water in a similar way.

1 Sample tool