This tutorial shows how to work with hue and what is the result of altering it.

Hue or Saturation?

Hue and saturation can easily be mistaken. Here is the main difference between them. Hue refers to nuance [blueish, reddish, pinkish, etc.]. In Photoshop, it determines the overall colour of the image. Saturation refers to the quantity of colour present. A b/w photo has 0% colour [black and white are non-colours]. Examples of hue altering are posted here.

What's on the menu today?
Well, today we are going to experiment with different Hue variations.

Step I - The base image

The image below has already been altered. This doesn't matter as we will change the nuance of the colours to emphasize how Hue works. You can best see these changes when the subject is against a plain background (dark wall, white surface, etc.). When applied to brick walls or other complex surfaces, the Hue change will make the image look as if you were on weed, thus being less artistic.

Step II - Adjusting the Hue

This step is fairly simple and can be done with minimum knowledge of PS. Go to the Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation menu and set the Hue slider to ~113. If you have doubts on how to do this, I suggest you check out the Saturation tutorial. By setting the Hue to 113, we can see that the image has turned from blue to pink. By looking at the two sets of rainbows you can see what nuance the resulting image will have. Note that you should NOT tick the Colorize box when working with a regular image [the current image has already been colorized.].

Upon entering a value of -83 on the Hue slider, the nuance of the image has become green. Note that the -100 and +100 values have the same effect [they colour the image a brownish red].
As the possibilities of Hue experimentation are endless, there will not be any final steps in this tutorial.

See Also:

• Saturation Tutorial
• Channel Surfing Tutorial
• Saturation
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