I’ve been building composites professionally for over a decade. Movie posters, book covers, album art. I sketch every single one on paper before I open any software, because I’ve learned the hard way that the planning phase is where composites live or die. So when a tutorial promises a “quick composite,” my instinct is usually skepticism. Quick composites tend to look like quick composites.

But I kept running into a specific problem in my client work: approval rounds. A client wants to see three different color directions for the same image before committing. I was rebuilding variations from scratch each time, which is slow and wasteful. I needed a smarter way to prototype color-shifted versions of a comp without blowing up my layer structure.

That’s what sent me back to this tutorial.

In this KelbyOne session, Dan Harlacher walks Scott Kelby through how to build a fast composite and execute a non-destructive color change inside ON1 Photo RAW. The whole thing moves quickly, but there’s real craft underneath the speed.

The Composite Setup: Sky Replacement as a Foundation Layer

Dan starts with a base image and drops in a replacement sky. This isn’t a gimmick. The sky in a composite is almost always the light source reference for everything else in the frame. Getting it in early means every decision you make afterward, blending, color grading, shadow direction, is already calibrated to a consistent light source.

Inside ON1, he uses the Layers panel to bring the sky in as a separate layer above the base image. The key move here is setting the blend mode to Luminosity or using the masking tools to confine the sky to the upper portion of the frame. He refines the edge using ON1’s built-in masking brush, which handles soft transitions between the horizon and the subject without requiring a manual pen path. For anyone coming from Photoshop, think of it as a faster version of Select and Mask, tuned specifically for sky-to-ground transitions.

The composite at this stage is intentionally simple. One subject, one sky, clean separation. That’s the right call when you’re building a base you plan to recolor.

The Color Change: Hue and Saturation With Targeted Masking

Here’s where the tutorial earns its keep. Dan demonstrates a color change on a specific element in the image, shifting a single object to a completely different hue without affecting the rest of the frame. He does this using an adjustment layer (Hue/Saturation) combined with a painted mask.

The workflow goes like this. Add a Hue/Saturation layer above the target element. Dial the Hue slider to your target color. Then invert the mask to black (hiding the effect entirely), and paint white only over the area you want to shift. If your subject has a consistent base color, ON1’s color range masking can do most of the selection automatically. You choose the target color from the image, set the range tolerance, and the mask builds itself, then you clean up the edges manually.

Dan pushes the Saturation up slightly after the hue shift to compensate for the desaturation that hue rotation can introduce. That’s a small detail but it matters. A color-shifted object that looks washed out reads as a compositing mistake rather than a creative choice.

Where This Breaks Down in Practice

I want to be honest about something. This workflow is excellent for prototyping, and for images where the subject has a relatively uniform base color. It becomes more complicated with textured or multicolored subjects, fabric with highlights that shift toward white, skin tones that overlap your target range, anything with iridescence.

I once spent three days trying to do a hue shift on a leather jacket for a book cover. The jacket was dark brown with warm orange highlights, and the client wanted it black. A straight Hue/Saturation pass turned the highlights green. I ended up doing it in three separate masked layers, each targeting a different luminosity range, and blending them together. That’s still a non-destructive approach and it lives in the same philosophical space as what Dan demonstrates here, but it’s a reminder that the “quick” in quick composite is conditional. It’s quick when the image cooperates.

For the approval-round problem I mentioned at the top, this technique works almost perfectly. When I’m showing a client three colorways, I duplicate the composite, swap the hue adjustment on the target layer, and export. The underlying comp is untouched. That alone saves me an hour per project cycle.

Applying This to Your Own Color Prototyping

If you want to build this into your own workflow, here’s how I’d approach it from the beginning. Start by flattening your thinking about “one image, one color direction.” Treat the color as a variable from the start of the comp, not something you lock in at the end. Build your masks before you commit to a hue. This means doing the masking work once and then being able to audition multiple colors against it without re-masking.

In ON1, you can duplicate an adjustment layer and change only the Hue value while keeping the mask intact. That’s the core of the technique. One mask, multiple color tests, all non-destructive, all reversible.

Dan also demonstrates how the sky replacement interacts with the overall color temperature of the image. A warmer sky will shift the entire mood. ON1’s Color Temperature sliders on the base layer let you bring the subject into alignment with the new sky without rebuilding the comp. This is the kind of ambient color matching that separates a composite that looks unified from one that looks pasted together.

The single most important thing I took from this tutorial is that non-destructive color prototyping is a client management tool as much as it is a creative one. If you can generate variations without rebuilding, you control the revision cycle.

Watch the full tutorial on the KelbyOne YouTube channel to see Dan walk through the exact settings visually. Some of the masking refinement is much easier to absorb by watching than by reading.