From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Color = Hue + Saturation - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Color = Hue + Saturation

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- [Instructor] All right, let's start by reviewing what it means to be color in the world of RGB Imaging as well as the specific world of Photoshop. Color very simply equals hue plus saturation. And hue as you may recall is measured in degrees starting at zero degrees for red and then continuing around this circle 60 degrees for yellow, 120 degrees for green, 180 degrees for cyan. All the way back to 360° which again is red. Saturation is measured in percentages from zero percent for gray at the center of this color wheel to 100 percent for full on color at the outside of the color wheel. So, for example, let's say I go to the color panel and I click on the fly out menu icon in the top-right corner and I choose HSB sliders and then I go ahead and grab my eyedropper tool which you can get by pressing the I key. Notice that I've reset my sample size to point sample so that I'm sampling a single so why the time and I also want my precise cursor. So I'll tap the caps lock key and I'll click right about there let's say and I'll drag out a little bit as well and you can see if I dragged down, there I've got it, that the hue is now zero degrees. Sure enough the saturation value is full on at 100 percent. And then we have this brightness value. We are not talking about brightness. Brightness is not part of color. Color is specifically hue plus saturation. Brightness is its own thing and if you really want to see what's going on, then you can click the fly out menu icon again and choose color wheel which is recent feature inside the software. I want to make it clear that I created this color wheel years and years before Adobe created this thing but the good news is that we're both in agreement with each other. So notice if I click and hold right about there in order to set the hue value to 60 degrees, as it is in my chart, saturation values full on 100 percent and this little circle here is at the same location in Adobe's color wheel as it is inside mine. And so if I continue dragging this thing around, ultimately get to 120 degrees for green as you're seeing right there. Which is how it's marked inside the graph so everything's an agreement where the color wheel is concerned. Where things are a little different is that you set the saturation inside of this triangle. So full on saturation is it the right tip of the triangle whereas no saturation at all is over here on the left hand side and then if you drag up, your going to make things brighter and if you drag down you're going to make things darker. So that's a little different than my graph. My graph varies in terms of luminance as you go toward the center and that's because of this layer right here. Notice this color wheel layer down here, at the bottom of the stack, it's got this gradient overlay effect. If you turn it off, then we have full-on saturated colors all over the place. That's not right either by the way. So that's why this gradient is turned on and notice if I double click on the gradient overlay in order to bring up the layer style dialog box. There's a lot of stuff going on and I change the blend mode to normal, that's more accurate. By the way, that's actually what happens when you sent the saturation value to zero percent, if the brightness value is 50 percent. if it was zero percent, it be black and if it was a hundred percent it be white. So I took a little liberty by setting this gray to the saturation blend mode which makes a graph a lot cooler looking. All right, so anyway, I'll go ahead and click okay and then I'll tap the caps lock key to return to the standard eyedropper cursor and that very simply is how color is a combination of hue and saturation working together here inside Photoshop

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