Learning Colour Grading in Adobe Lightroom,
Therefore, Learning color grading in Lightroom involves progressing from essential initial adjustments to creative, detailed tonal manipulation. Color grading is about adding style, emotion, and a specific mood to your image, distinct from color correction, which focuses on technical accuracy (like white balance and exposure).
Learning Colour Grading in Adobe Lightroom,
🎨 Basic Color Grading Workflow:
Therefore, start with fundamental adjustments to create a good foundation for your creative grading.
1. Initial Color Correction:
Therefore, before creative color grading, ensure your image has a balanced starting point. It’s best to work with RAW files for maximum flexibility.
- White Balance (Temp & Tint): Therefore, adjust these sliders in the Basic Panel to remove any unwanted color casts and set a neutral or desired initial temperature (warmer or cooler).
- Tone (Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks): Optimize the light and contrast. Adjusting these first ensures the color wheels later have the appropriate tonal ranges to work with.
- Tone Curve: Therefore, use the Tone Curve for a finer adjustment of contrast. An S-curve adds classic contrast, while lifting the black point creates a faded, matte look.
Learning Colour Grading in Adobe Lightroom,
2. The Color Grading Panel (Three-Way Wheels)
Therefore, this is the heart of color grading in modern Lightroom (replacing the older Split Toning tool). It allows you to introduce color tints into specific tonal ranges.
- Shadows Wheel: Target the dark areas of your photo. Often, adding a cool color (blues, cyans) to the shadows creates contrast with warm highlights (the popular “Teal & Orange” cinematic look).
- Midtones Wheel: Target the middle-gray tones. Using this wheel requires subtlety to avoid an over-edited look.
- Highlights Wheel: Target the bright areas. Often, adding a warm color (yellows, oranges) enhances the feeling of sunlight or warmth.
- Luminance Sliders: These are located below each wheel and control the brightness of the respective tonal range. Darken the shadows or brighten the highlights after applying a tint for more impact.
Learning Colour Grading in Adobe Lightroom,
🔬 Advanced Techniques:
In other words, to move beyond the basics and develop a unique style, incorporate these advanced tools and concepts.
1. HSL / Color Panel:
In other words, the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance (HSL) panel provides surgical control over specific colors in your image, independent of the tonal wheels.
- Hue: In other words, shift the color itself (e.g., turning greens toward yellow or cyan). Great for stylizing foliage or skies.
- Saturation: Increase or decrease the intensity of a specific color. Use to desaturate distracting colors or boost key colors like a subject’s outfit.
- Luminance: However, adjust the brightness of a specific color (e.g., darkening the blue luminance to make a sky moodier, or brightening the red/orange luminance to make skin tones pop).
2. Blending and Balance:
In other words, these sliders in the Color Grading panel give you advanced control over the wheel’s influence.
- Blending: Controls how smoothly the color tints applied to the shadows, midtones, and highlights transition into one another. A higher blending value creates a smoother, more uniform look; a lower value makes the transition more abrupt.
- Balance: However, it shifts the boundary between the shadows/midtones and midtones/highlights. Moving the slider left gives more weight to the shadow tint; moving it right gives more weight to the highlight tint.
Learning Colour Grading in Adobe Lightroom,
3. Calibration Panel:
However, the Calibration panel is one of the most powerful and often overlooked tools for subtle, global color shifts. It works by adjusting the primary colors (Red, Green, and Blue) that make up all the colors in your image.
- However, shifting the Primary Hues affects every color derived from that primary. For example, shifting the Red Primary Hue towards orange/yellow can affect skin tones and other reds across the entire image in a nuanced way.
- Above all, Adjusting Primary Saturation can globally increase or decrease the intensity of that primary color.
4. Masking (Local Adjustments)
However, for professional-level grading, use local adjustments with Masking to apply color shifts to only a portion of the image.
- Above all, use brushes, radial, or linear gradients to select areas like the sky, a subject, or a specific foreground element.
- In addition, within the mask, you can apply White Balance, HSL, or the Color Grading tool to target the mood in only that area, for instance, making the sky cooler or warming up a subject’s face.
In conclusion, this video offers a complete guide to Lightroom’s color grading tool, demonstrating how to use the different color wheels.
