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The Chroma-Luma mode lets you alter the hue and lightness of colors in the image simultaneously. This may not feel like a particularly intuitive way of working, as the grid controls are overlaid on colors projected as different sides of an RGB cube. However, this enables some powerful adjustments once you get the hang of how multiple adjustments interact in this mode, as well as the power of locking control points to limit your adjustments to specific areas of the two grids.
Whether you’re sampling the image or manipulating the control points of this grid directly, dragging any point of this grid changes the color of the image corresponding to that point. Vertical adjustments change lightness, where up makes that part of the image lighter, and down makes that part of the image darker. Horizontal adjustments change hue, depending on which range of hues are shown in the two Chroma-Luma warping controls, and which of these you’re adjusting.
By default, only the outer four corners of this control are locked, so any adjustment you make to any control point pushes and pulls all the other colors throughout the image, depending on your adjustment. Working this way, multiple adjustments to multiple colors gradually pins different colors into place, with each adjustment warping the colors falling in between to maintain a smooth transformation from one adjustment to the next. This can be a good way to make an overall stylistic adjustment to the image.
The original image
The result of making multiple interacting color adjustments across the entire Chroma Luma grid
Another approach to using this mode is to make more targeted corrections by manually locking different colors in the image that you don’t want to adjust. You can do this by using the Selection tool and Shift-clicking any value in the Viewer, or by Shift-clicking any control point on the grid control.
By locking colors you don’t want to change, you can focus on manipulating a more specific range of colors without altering the entire image.