What Are Hue and Saturation?
Color is too complex to define with a single set
of names or numerical values. After all, if I de-
scribe a color as orange, you don’t know if it’s
yellowish or reddish, vivid or drab. So Photo-
shop subdivides color into two properties, hue
and saturation:
- Sometimes called the tint, the hue is the
core color—red, yellow, green, and so on.
When you see a rainbow, you’re looking at
pure, unmitigated hue. - Known variously as chroma and purity, sat-
uration measures the intensity of a color. By
way of example, compare Figure 6-3, which
shows a sampling of hues at their highest
possible saturation values, to Figure 6-4,
which shows the same hues at reduced
saturations.
The stark contrast between Figures 6-3 and
6-4 may lead you to conclude that garish satu-
ration values are better. But while this may be
true for fruit and candy, most of the real world
is painted in more muted hues, including many
of the colors we know by name. Pink is a light,
low-saturation variation of red; brown encom-
passes a range of dark, low-saturation reds
and oranges. Figure 6-5 shows a collection of
browns at normal and elevated saturation lev-
els. Which would you prefer to eat: The yummy
low-saturation morsel on the left or the vivid
science experiment on the right?
Photoshop provides several commands that
give you selective control over all aspects
of color, including hue, saturation, and
more specialized attributes. Armed with
these commands, you have all the tools
you need to get the color balance of your
images just right. The first three exercises
of this lesson will be primarily concerned
with color adjustment.
Figure 6-3.Figure 6-4.Figure 6-5.What Are Hue and Saturation? 181