Tame Wild Colors in Luminar with this Easy Trick

I love using the color tools in Luminar because they are very powerful, and of course I love color. But due to the power of these tools, I find that sometimes it is easy to go too far with the edit, and not even realize it. The result is that you end up with a very saturated image that looks over-edited (because it is).

In the video below, I show an example of this using my favorite color tool in Luminar, which is Color Harmony. Color Harmony actually has 4 different sections, and if you use several of them on a photo, you end up with a lot of color. And yes, you can certainly go back and reduce the sliders to lower amounts to fix this. But there is another way as well.

When I look at my images and focus on color, I like to observe which tonal areas in the photo are most impacted by the color adjustments I make. For a sunset, it is usually most visible in the highlights and maybe the midtones, but it does depend on the image and of course on which adjustments you have made.

So what I often do to control this over-saturated look is to use Color Harmony with a Luminosity Mask. This gives me the ability to control which tonal areas are getting the most color, and which ones are not. And I can also fade it smoothly from one tonal area to the next, to ensure a subtle blend.

A key tip here is to make sure you are looking at the histogram as well. Since the histogram shows the distribution of light in an image, that’s an easy way to see which tonal areas are dominant and thus it can help you decide where to distribute the color adjustment via the luminosity mask. It’s a very powerful combo and one that will help you get gorgeous yet subtle enhancements to color.

Check out the video below for a full demonstration of this technique in action. Thanks!