The color wheel: hue, chroma, and lightness

The color wheel is the main surface in the Color tab (shortcut 2). It plots your photo's colors so you can select one and shift it. This page explains what the wheel shows and how to move around it; for the drag-a-pin workflow see Editing colors.

The three axes

Any color on the wheel is described by three separate quantities. Keeping them separate lets you change one without disturbing the others.

Hue — the angle

Hue is the angle around the center. Traveling around the rim moves through the spectrum, from reds to greens to blues and back.

Chroma — distance from the center

Chroma is what many people call saturation: distance from the middle outward. The exact center is neutral gray, with no color at all; colors grow more vivid the farther out they sit toward the rim.

Lightness — the separate strip

How light a color is lives on its own Lightness strip beneath the wheel, not on the disc. Because the disc is drawn at a single fixed lightness, a dot's brightness on the disc is only for display — each color still carries its own true lightness, which you read on the strip and in the photo. Double-click the strip to reset it.

More consistent movement across colors

The wheel is built on OKLab, a color space designed to keep color changes more visually consistent. In practice this means a drag of a given length tends to produce a similar-looking shift whether you start from a green or a blue, and rotating a hue tends to hold its lightness fairly steady rather than drifting brighter or darker. Movement stays more visually consistent from one color to the next, which makes it easier to judge edits by eye across the frame.

Your photo on the wheel

The soft cloud of colored dots on the disc is your photo: every pixel plotted by its hue and chroma. Reading the cloud helps you plan a grade before you place a pin — you can see greens split into two clumps, or a sky that is really a gradient of blues.

The points hold still while you grade, so the disc stays a stable map of the colors you actually shot and a pin reads as one clean move from the color you grabbed to where you are sending it. That is easiest to follow when several pins are in play at once.

Static or live color points

The gear in the wheel's bottom-right corner opens the wheel's options, where Color points offers two behaviors:

• Static — the default. Every point stays at the color it came from in your photo. The wheel is a fixed map of what you shot, and each pin reads as a clear move away from it.
• Live — the points flow along with your pins as you drag, so the cloud shows the graded result rather than the original colors. Useful when you want to watch colors converge on a target, or simply prefer the motion.

Your choice is remembered between photos and sessions.

A second image's colors can sit on the disc alongside your own, as a fixed target to grade toward — see Reference image.

Getting around

Most photos use only part of the disc, so the wheel opens already framed on your colors.

1. Press the Fit button (F, "Frame the photo's colors") to zoom to the colors actually in the photo.
2. Press the 1:1 button (0, "Full wheel") to pull back to the entire disc.
3. Zoom in to pull apart tones that sit almost on top of each other, so you can place a pin on one without catching the other.

When you are zoomed in, a faint ring-and-spoke graticule and a colored compass edge keep you oriented — which direction is warmer, where neutral sits, and where any off-screen pins point.

It usually helps to set the scene — exposure, white balance, and contrast — before grading color on the wheel. See Tone and contrast.