I’ve been doing this long enough to know that most of my time on a composite doesn’t go toward the hard stuff. It goes toward friction. Opening the wrong app, bouncing between tools that don’t talk to each other, second-guessing a mask that was fine twenty minutes ago. The actual creative decisions take maybe thirty percent of the session. The rest is process drag.

That’s why I keep coming back to tutorials from people who’ve built tight, confident workflows. Not because I’m looking to copy their steps exactly, but because watching someone move through a technique without hesitation reminds me where I’m wasting motion. Dan Harlacher’s session on compositing and color manipulation, featured in this KelbyOne tutorial with Scott Kelby, was one of those reminders.

Why Quick Composites Are Harder Than They Look

There’s a version of “quick composite” that means sloppy composite. Rough edges, mismatched light, colors that don’t belong in the same universe. I’ve shipped a few of those in my early days and I still feel them. The challenge with a fast composite isn’t speed. It’s maintaining enough control over the result that it reads as intentional, not accidental.

What Harlacher demonstrates is how ON1 Photo RAW handles that tension well when you understand the tools available to you. The software is doing more work than it gets credit for, and his walkthrough makes that legible.

The Composite Build: Layer Logic and Masking in ON1

Harlacher starts by bringing a background image into ON1’s Layers panel, then placing a foreground subject on top. If you haven’t used ON1’s layer system before, think of it as a streamlined version of what you’d do in Photoshop, with fewer steps between intention and execution.

The key move in the masking stage is using ON1’s Masking Brush with the AI-assisted edge detection turned on. He paints roughly over the subject area and the software refines the edge automatically, picking up hair and soft transitions without requiring you to manually trace every pixel. He adjusts the Overlay setting to check the mask accuracy, looking for haloing or hard transitions, and cleans up any problem spots with the Refine brush rather than the main Masking Brush. That distinction matters. The Refine brush is specifically built for edge zones. Using the Masking Brush to fix edges often creates new problems.

Once the mask is solid, he sets the blend mode on the subject layer to Normal and adjusts opacity if the integration needs softening. The result is a clean composite that took a fraction of the time a manual path-based mask would require.

The Color Change: Hue and Targeted Adjustments

This is where the session gets genuinely useful for production work. Harlacher uses ON1’s Color Range masking inside a Local Adjustments layer to isolate a specific color in the image and shift it entirely. He selects the target color using the eyedropper, dials in the Hue Shift to move it across the spectrum, and uses the Saturation and Luminosity sliders to keep the new color looking physically plausible rather than painted on.

The precision step that separates this from a basic hue rotation: he narrows the color range selector so it’s only affecting his target and not bleeding into adjacent tones. If your subject is wearing a blue jacket and there’s blue sky in the frame, a broad color range selection will shift both. Tightening that selection range isolates the jacket without touching the sky. He also layers a small amount of Color Blur on the mask itself to feather the selection edge, which prevents the hard band you’d otherwise see between the shifted color and the surrounding image.

The result is a color change that reads as photographic rather than digital. That’s the bar I hold any color work to. If it looks like a recolor, it failed.

Where I’d Push This Further (and Where It Falls Down)

I’ll use this approach for fast client variations and mood explorations. When a client asks to see the same composite in three different color directions, this workflow turns that into a thirty-minute task instead of a half-day rebuild.

But here’s the honest caveat: this technique depends heavily on the quality of your source material. Harlacher is working with clean, well-lit images where the colors are distinct and well-separated in the image data. When I’ve tried this on images with heavy noise, strong color casts from practical lights, or compressed JPEGs, the Color Range mask gets messy fast. The AI masking also struggles on fine fur textures and motion blur in ways that require manual cleanup. This is a workflow built for controlled conditions. If you’re pulling source images from stock with inconsistent quality, budget extra time for the mask refinement step regardless of how well the initial pass looks.

The one habit I’d add from my own practice: before touching any color adjustments, I always set a new group layer and label it with the color direction I’m testing. It takes five seconds and it means I can toggle between versions without rebuilding anything. Harlacher’s demo doesn’t go into version management, which makes sense for a short-form tutorial, but on real jobs that layer organization is what keeps the file from becoming a disaster at revision three.

The Actual Takeaway

The speed is a side effect, not the goal. What Harlacher is really demonstrating is that a confident masking pass and a targeted color adjustment, done with the right tool settings, produce results that hold up at full resolution. Every shortcut here is about removing friction, not removing craft.

Watch the full tutorial on KelbyOne’s YouTube channel for the visual demonstration, especially the Color Range selection refinement step, which is much easier to follow when you can see the mask overlay in real time.