Successful Color Processing in DxO PhotoLab

The Three Pillars of Color Grading

Successful color processing in DxO PhotoLab depends on the same three pillars of Color that are used in all digital editing systems. Hue, Saturation and Luminance.

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Hue, Saturation and Luminance.

Most editors have a tool similar to the HSL Wheel used in DxO PhotoLab, Lightroom does, Affinity does, I struggle to think of a tool that doesn’t. But many photographers don’t fully appreciate the power of this tool. It enables us to alter the Color of the Color (Hue), the intensity of the color (Saturation) and the Brighness of the color (Luminence) but in what order should these three settings be adjusted and should they all be adjusted?

Let’s take a step back. Anyone who has edited images for any length of time realises pretty quickly that in the set of global adjustments, both Exposure and Contrast mess with the hue and saturation of the colours in the image. Similarly , Saturation is applied to all of the colours, whereas Vibrancy is applied to the colours that are not already saturated. All of these sliders, used judiciously can make a picture “pop”. The only problem is, this comes at the expense of control over the way the image presents. If you are trying to grade a picture to conform to the vision you had when you took the photograph, these sliders will have you chasing your tail before you can blink. Decrease exposure? Lessen Saturation!

Repeatable Processes

I am a strong advocate for repeatable processes to guide my image processing. By this I mean using frameworks that include tools in certain categories that enable me to move through the editing process using one or more of the tools from each category until the image is looking the way I imagined it would look when I shot it.

These are the steps I take with my landscape photography, regardless of whether I’m using DxO PhotoLab, Lightroom, or Affinity. I choose the platform based on the requirements of the photograph.

1. Exposure Correction
2. Color Correction
3. Color Grade
   • Hue
   • Saturation
   • Luminence
4. Local Adjustments (Dodging & Burning)

Before and After

Light

Exposure

The first stage is to correct the exposure in the image. Adjust the Exposure, Highlights and Shadows until the Blacks are not crushed and the Highlights are not blown. At this stage we’re aiming to get balance into the image and to give ourselves headroom at both ends of the dark -> light continuum. Be aware that many of the tools will affect one or other of these end points and you want to give yourself room to edit.

Color Temperature

Color temperature correction is a global correction that affects the warmth of the entire image. Blue tones are cold, Yellow tones are Warm. In nudging the Color Temperature controls, we’re affecting the whole image. Modern cameras do a pretty good job of setting the base color temperature, but some photographers like to input custom values such as 5500k for daylight. The advantage of doing this is that it gives control back to the photographer. Cameras can be fooled and so when I’m using Auto White Balance I always check it at the beginning of the process.

The reason we do these adjustments first is that every successive adjustment builds on these base settings. If you don’t correct, for example, a blue cast in your image then when you adjust other properties, the corrections are relative to these settings. Going back and resetting Color Temperature half way through an edit will usually mean resetting 90% of the edits you made up to the point you decided to reset color temp!

Smart Lighting in DxO

DxO have a unique tool called Smart Lighting that allows the user some control over the distribution of light across the image. In Uniform mode it unblocks shadows and pulls back detail from highlights. Useful for backlit scenarios and it also allows you to choose an area (face or other area of interest) to use as the basis for adjustment (spot weighted)

Color Correction

Once you have set a global color temperature, you can move into more finely grained corrections.

The tools that are useful here are the HSL and the Tone Curve.

In this first phase we are looking at correction rather than enhancement. If the Color Temperature is correct then 90% of your work here is already done but I will typically use the tone curve in RGB mode to set contrast levels. I very rarely use the contrast slider these days. The tone curve allows you to select a range of tones and apply changes to the luminance to that range alone, creating contrast begins with an s-curve where darks are made darker and lights lighter. No need to be heavy handed, a very small adjustment makes a lot of difference.

You can use the Gamma slider to lift or darken the whole image, maintaining the relationship you have set up by manipulating points on the curve.

Color Grading

This is the creative bit – this is where we can adjust colours to suit the image we have in mind.

We’ll be using the same tools that I mentioned in the Color Correction phase, but in a more targeted fashion.

HSL Tool

In DxO PhotoLab, the HSL wheel allows you to adjust colours globally or via any one of eight dedicated channels, or segments of the color wheel.

Whether you click on a channel or use the dropper tool to sample an area of the image, the wheel responds to the hue of the area you have picked.

In this picture, of a butterfly, the blue of the rock underneath the sand is a little distracting, drawing the eye away from the butterfly. So I selected the blue channel and moved the outer ring to the yellow part of the wheel.

So, a subtle change but it draws the colours together in the whole image and makes for a more coherent colour scheme.

Let’s have a look at something more obvious.

This photograph was taken in Andalucia at a time when Calima was in the air – sand from the Sahara in the upper atmosphere. The photos are always unrealistically orange! So what if we could change this to a more conventional twilight scene?

I moved the outer ring into the blue zone, decreased the saturation and luminosity a touch. And now it’s a credible moonrise. I can’t add the stars but it’s a good start and you’ll be able to see here how with masks, you could change the color of clothes for example in a portrait session.

Between these extremes, there’s a wealth of nuanced color control, used in conjunction with masks, the HSL Tool is very powerful indeed.

Tone Curve

DxO PhotoLab offers five different tone curves, these are built into a single Tone Curve Tool.

The first, the combined RGB tool, we already used to set the contrast in the image. In addition to RGB we have Red (R), Green (G), Blue (B) and Luma (L). The R, G and B curves can be used to adjust color and they don’t have to be deployed as s-curves. We used the Luma tool to set the luminosity of the image based on the mid tones.

Red

Increasing the value of a range on the Red Curve will introduce more Red to that range, but there’s something else at play here. If you look at the color wheel you’ll find that the opposite of Red is Cyan and reducing the value of a range on the Red Curve will introduce more Cyan into the image.

Green

Similarly, increasing the value of a range on the Green Curve will introduce more Green to that range. If you look at the color wheel you’ll find that the opposite of Green is Magenta and reducing the value of a range on the Green Curve will introduce more Magenta into the image.

Blue

Here, increasing the value of a range on the Blue Curve will introduce more Blue to that range. If you look at the color wheel you’ll find that the opposite of Blue is Yellow and reducing the value of a range on the Blue Curve will introduce more Yellow into the image.

Let’s have a look and see how this works on an image.

This picture has had basic corrections applied.

Here, we’ve added a little contrast using the tone curve. I’ve pulled the darks down and pushed the highlights a tiny bit.

Here I’ve used the Red curve to add warmth, a touch of red in the mid tones.

And finally, a touch of magenta in the highlights adding a bruised effect to the sky. A little overdone, but this is a key point – always walk away from the screen and give your eyes a rest, then return and adjust!

Conclusion

DxO PhotoLab is very much geared to point and click editing – it does away with the complexity of layers familiar to Affinity and Photoshop users and if in doing so, some of the subtlety achievable in those applications is harder to do in PhotoLab, it’s not the end of the world and for many users it’s a welcome strength of the application!

The principles that I’ve outlined here will help avoid most of the pitfalls in color grading and now that PhotoLab has a decent masking capability, it is possible to do quite advanced color editing in PhotoLab alone. And of course, if you add the free Affinity software to your armoury you can flex your grading muscles to your hearts content, starting off in PhotoLab and bringing Affinity in for the more advanced functionality.

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