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Colour & Colour Management

HSL

A colour model describing colour by hue, saturation and lightness, widely used for targeted colour editing.

In depth

HSL matters in practice because it matches how photographers think: you rarely want to change red, green and blue values, but you often want a specific colour to be a different shade, more intense or brighter. Editing tools expose it as per-colour-band sliders, letting a single hue range be adjusted while the rest of the frame is untouched.

Examples in practice

Dropping the luminance of the blue band alone deepens a sky without darkening anything else in the landscape.