Adjust the colors in your photos on your phone or tablet

What you’ll learn

Color evokes emotion and memory, and it’s a powerful way to communicate visually. So it can be disappointing if some of the colors in a photo look darker, duller, or just different than the colors you remember from the scene. The good news is that Lightroom has tools designed to enhance specific colors in a photo, and you can take advantage of these tools even when you’re on the go, editing photos on a mobile device.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to fine-tune individual colors in your photos using the Color Mix panel and Targeted Adjustment tool in Lightroom. You’ll see how to do this on a phone, but remember that you can do the same thing in Lightroom on your computer, your tablet, and the web.

Tap the Add Photos button to add a photo to Lightroom from your camera roll, or choose a photo already in Lightroom. Open your photo in Edit view.

Tap the Color icon in the bar at the bottom of the Edit screen.

Then tap the Mix icon to open the Color Mix panel, where you can adjust colors individually.

Use the sliders in the Color Mix panel to adjust a particular color everywhere that color appears in your photo. Each of the circle icons represents a separate range of colors. Tap a circle icon to select the range of colors to adjust.

Then drag the sliders for that color to adjust the hue, saturation, and/or luminance of that color throughout your photo. Hue is essentially another word for color, saturation is the intensity of a color, and luminance is the brightness of a color.

In this example, we selected the Orange icon and dragged the Saturation slider to the right. This increases the intensity of the oranges throughout the photo, giving more punch and visual interest to the cliffs. With the Blue icon selected, we used all three sliders to fine-tune the blues, which changes the appearance of the sky.

You can adjust colors directly on the image with the Targeted Adjustment tool. This is an intuitive way to identify and change specific colors.

First, tap the Targeted Adjustment icon in the Color Mix panel to activate the tool. Then select the color property you want to adjust: Hue, Saturation, or Luminance.

Then tap in the image on a color you want to change, and drag horizontally or vertically. The selected hue, saturation, or luminance of the sampled color(s) changes throughout the photo as you drag.

In this example, we selected Saturation, tapped on the grass with the Targeted Adjustment tool and dragged left, causing both greens and yellows to become less saturated throughout the photo.

When you’re finished with the Targeted Adjustment tool, tap its tool icon again to return to the Color Mix panel. You can continue to fine-tune colors with the sliders in this panel. Tap Done when you’re ready to close the Color Mix panel.