Make colour adjustments

How to adjust the hue, saturation and lightness of specific colours

- George Cairns

BEFORE

AFTER

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes

YOU WILL LEARN How to use the Selective Color and Color Balance panels, and Desaturate brush

YOU’LL NEED Pixelmator Pro 2.1.2, macOS 10.14 or later

By default, your iPhone’s Camera app can capture true colors in a range of different lighting conditions such as direct sunlight or under artificial tungsten lights. However, there are times when you might want to adjust a particular color’s hue, saturation, brightness, and balance to produce more creative looks. By selectively darkening the brightness of a sky you can make it look more dramatic and cause clouds to stand out in contrast for example. Or by reducing the saturation of a range of colors you can draw the eye to a fully saturated subject, such as a red bus against a black-and-white background. This is known as the spot color effect. You can even fast-forward the seasons and turn summer into autumn by tweaking the hue of a tree’s yellows and greens.

Pixelmator Pro has a handy Selective Color panel that enables you to adjust the hue, saturation, and brightness value of specific colors to produce all these creative effects.

HOW TO Adjust a sky’s hue and lightness

1 Boost colours

Press A to go to Pixelmator Pro’s Color Adjustments workspace. Drag Vibrance right. This selectively boosts the saturation of common landscape colours such as green fields and blue skies (without over-saturating skin tones).

2 Darken blues