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Introduction to the Color Warper
The Color Warper palette is a mesh-based warping tool that, instead of warping the spatial location of pixels, warps one set of colors into another. Better yet, unlike the HSL curves, the Color Warper lets you simultaneously adjust two color parameters at the same time, within user-selectable regions of specific hues. These adjustments, made using a grid of draggable control points, automatically have a smooth falloff from the colors you’re warping to other colors that are locked into place. The smoothness of this falloff depends on the distance between the warp points that are being adjusted and other warp points that are locked in place to prevent change.
The Color Warper, located in the center palette area
There are two ways you can use this tool. You can drag the control points in the grid to make highly specific image adjustments. More intuitively, you can click to sample the image, which selects the closest grid point that affects that color, and then drag to make an adjustment with that control point.
Clicking and dragging to sample skin tone in the Viewer to adjust that color’s control point on the Hue-Saturation warping grid
You can use this tool to make extremely specific adjustments to colors in an image, similar to what you might do with a Qualifier key or with the HSL curves. However, by warping the points using a grid, you can manipulate two color characteristics at the same time, adjusting both hue and saturation,
or chroma and luma. In the following example, specific adjustments are being made to refine the woman’s shirt, to adjust her skin tone, and to manipulate the greens of the foliage in the shot. All three of these naturalistic adjustments are smooth and artifact-free by virtue of the Color Warper’s method of cleanly remapping color.
(Top) The original image, (Bottom) Manipulating the hue and saturation of the grass using the Chroma-Luma controls
You can also use this tool to create wide-ranging stylistic looks for the overall image, bending the color in creative ways that other controls don’t. In the following image, the less saturated and neutral colors of the image are all warped towards a bluish-cyan, while the more saturated oranges are warped towards a saturated orange-red, to quickly create a stylistic treatment of the image.
(Top) The original image, (Bottom) Stylizing the overall image using the Hue-Saturation controls