Boost colours in Affinity Photo

Get to grips with the powerful HSL tool and learn how to make your images pop

- James Paterson

Sometimes colours need a subtle boost to make your images shine. Affinity Photo offers an array of colour controls that let you achieve this with ease. We mostly use these tools to boost the existing colours in a scene so that the image ‘pops’ off the screen or out of the print. But if you like, you can also use these tools to completely change a colour from one shade to another.

In this tutorial we’ll focus on the excellent HSL tool. This stands for Hue, Saturation and Luminosity: three factors that control the shade, intensity and brightness of the colours in the image. Not only can you use the control to boost colours, but you can also target precise colour ranges within the image, allowing you to alter one colour without affecting others.

We’ll use the HSL tool here to enhance the colourful feathers in a macaw, but you’ll find these tips useful no matter what you’re editing. Whether you want to boost the blue sky in a landscape, draw attention to colourful clothes or change the colour of anything you like, the HSL tool can help. You’ll find a full walkthrough of the technique in the accompanying video. Get the Affinity Photo trial at affinity.serif.com