Editing photo colors directly

To change a color, place a pin on it and move the pin. This page covers selecting a color and shaping its hue, chroma, and lightness, plus controlling how much of the frame the pin catches.

Place a pin

Put a pin on a color by clicking it in the photo or by clicking it directly on the wheel — both do the same thing. Clicking an existing pin selects it instead of creating a new one, and a pin you place but never move is discarded when you click away.

When two areas share a color and you want only one — the sky, not the ocean — hold Ctrl and drag a box over the region in the photo. Sampling a region fits the pin to that patch's color and its brightness, which is more precise than a single click.

For how the cloud is laid out (hue as angle, chroma as distance from center), see Reading the color wheel.

Move hue, chroma, and lightness

Dragging the pin sets where the color goes. The dashed origin marker left behind is the color you started from; drag that marker instead to re-aim the selection without starting over. The color toolbar's two swatches carry the tooltips "Selected color (origin)" and "Shifted to (destination)".

Lightness is a separate axis. The Lightness strip under the wheel makes the selected color lighter or darker without changing its hue. Double-click the strip to reset it.

Alt+scroll spins the hues inside the selection in place, which fans a flat color into a range rather than relocating it wholesale.

Control how much the pin catches

Scroll over a pin to size its selection: scroll up to gather in more neighboring colors, down to tighten onto the color you clicked. If the edge of the selection looks abrupt, hold Shift while scrolling to soften the feather without changing how much area it covers. The selection is always feathered rather than hard-edged.

Hold H while sizing a pin to see exactly which pixels it is catching. OKLab keeps color movement more visually consistent from one color to the next.

Separate two similar colors

For two colors that sit close together on the wheel — a warm skin tone and an orange wall, or haze blue and zenith blue in one sky:

1. Split them by tone. Right-click the pin and open Lightness range, then choose Shadows, Midtones, Highlights, or Full range so the pin acts on only part of the tonal scale. See Luminance masks for how lightness bands work.

2. Sample the exact region. Hold Ctrl and drag over the color you mean, so the pin fits that patch's color and brightness rather than everything sharing its hue.

3. Grade the halves separately. Duplicate the pin and give each copy its own lightness range. You can place up to eight pins on a photo.