10 Essential Color Editing Techniques in Lightroom

I don't know about you but for me one of the most challenging things about digital raw photography is color color drives me crazy color honestly is the kind of thing that at times just makes me want to raise the white flag and say forget it I'm just going to shoot black and white or put the digital camera away and just shoot film and until that day comes when we can just you know type into an input field and Lightroom what we want an image to look like and then it color grades the image for us no that day is coming right well for now at least uh the ball's in our court so uh what I want to share with you in this video are uh some tips some techniques some recommendations some of the tools that I would recommend exploring and experimenting with okay so here we are in Adobe Lightroom classic and what we're going to do here is we're going to begin with just a few basic initial things that I recommend setting up at the beginning of your edit and then we're going to eventually get into more uh Advanced more nuanced things as we go along so the first thing that I recommend doing when you first sit down to edit a raw file is to check and see what color profile is currently assigned to it now if you are a relative newcomer to Adobe Lightroom or camera raw if you open up this profile here you will see that there are you know a number of different Adobe branded options in here these are all just general basic you know color profiles that are intentionally designed to provide consistent results with all the different you know types of cameras that are out there from Nikon to Fuji to Sony to Canon and depending on the type of camera that you're using Adobe color may be perfectly fine like it may look fine with your raw files but I know from personal experience that Canon Canon raw files for whatever reason just never seem to look all that good in Adobe color or adobe standard but regardless of what type of camera you're using what I recommend doing instead of using Adobe color is to come up here and to click on this a little let me go back because I probably did that quickly click on this little four you know Square icon here and then in here in this drop down you will see a drop down for camera matching these are custom color profiles created by Adobe that match the uh the picture styles that are built into your particular camera for example standard always seems to work really well for me especially with landscape images anything that has you know nice like yellows and oranges and the highlights like this oh and by the way one of the things that you can do if you go into the preferences of Lightroom let me just open that up really quick go to the presets Tab and then here you will see raw defaults and the initial value here will be Adobe default what you can do is change this over to camera settings and what will then happen is that whenever you import raw files from your camera the Baseline camera matching profile for that camera will be applied to it automatically instead of using Adobe color okay my next recommendation after you have made a decision about your color profile when you begin a raw edit the next thing that I would do is just kind of forget about color for a little bit just kind of you know push color over here to the side when you start adjusting the tonality of your image when you start adjusting exposure your contrast you are also affecting color specifically you are affecting the saturation of color this is why a lot of times when you start increasing the contrast of an image or especially that dehaze tool in Lightroom if you start pushing that thing up the colors in your image are these oftentimes can get kind of Muddy like blue skies can get like really dark blue oranges and reds start getting over saturated so it's better I think to make decisions about the tonality and contrast of an image without involving color unfortunately in Lightroom that is really simple and easy to do all you have to do is come up here to the treatment row at the beginning or at the very top of the develop panel and change this from color to black and white now just to clarify we are not creating a black and white image here all we are doing is just temporarily disabling color in the image so that we can focus on the tonality I can come in here and you know make adjustments to the highlights and the image I can adjust the whites maybe pull up the blacks a little bit or the shadows in order to you know pull out some additional detail there but all what I'm really trying to do here is just create a better bass line just kind of normalize some of the tonal some of the tonal values and then when you're done with that and you feel like you're in a in a good place all you have to do is come back up here to treatment and then click on color and then the color returns to the image and I have found this to be just a good way to kind of trick your eye because you know then you're not being fooled by color you're not allowing color to influence your decisions in any way and um and it's uh and it's a very effective technique I have found so definitely give that a try all right so my next color tip is about the next row down in the develop panel which is white balance white balance is a a rather deceptively simple tool and and the reason I say that is because when I first got it I speak with experience because when I first got into you know like uh photography a number of years ago I was under the impression at first that you know white balance was you know something that had to be corrected you know that it always had to be corrected and uh truth be told I I made many of my images worse so let's jump back into uh Lightroom here and I'm going to show you an example okay so this is a raw image here that was captured uh in Iceland in the highlands of Iceland a few years ago and you will notice over here that I have my y balance currently set to as shot this is actually the correct white balance of the image because this image was taken like around midnight in summer when you know Iceland has its Midnight Sun where the you know where the it never gets completely dark it actually just kind of gets a little bit dim like a 40 watt bulb like between um you know like 11 P.M 3 A.M somewhere in there and at that time of day there's all this blue atmospheric light that is uh that is bouncing off of the stratosphere and is casting this blue color cast all over the the uh the volcanic rock here in the foreground so let's just say for the sake of argument that uh that you know uh this is me from years ago and I'm looking at this image and I'm thinking yeah this image is totally wrong and has too much color cast in it there's too much blue I should correct uh the color cast well obviously we could do that by coming up here and grabbing the eyedropper find something white or neutral or gray in the image and this is probably the best thing I can just click on the hood of the car here and now the paint on the Land Rover is pure white like it is you know spectrally neutral but now if we back out and take a look at the image well now we have a completely different image I mean other areas of the image that are neutral like the snow and the and the Cloudy overcast Sky up here those are now neutral as well and the moss on the Hills up here also that kind of yellowy green that you see in Iceland so this is a technically corrected image like I have corrected the white balance in the image in order to make all the neutrals spectrally neutral but what I have also done here is change the the light I've changed the light in the image to make it appear as if this image was taken midday now it looks like it was taken on a warm overcast day in the middle of the afternoon because in the middle of the afternoon the color temperature of the Sun is like around 5600 Kelvin so it looks now like midday which is nothing like you know what the actual experience of of being there was like it's correct but now it has no character like there's no longer any story uh with the image now some of you may look at this and think that you know the corrected version looks better and if you do that's totally cool like everyone has color is a highly subjective thing everyone has a different opinion my opinion is that the image loses something by being you know correct did in a technical manner like this the better white balance for the photo is one that faithfully and authentically represents the color temperature of light when the photo was actually taken so in summary here my recommendation to you when you sit down and edit a raw image and you undoubtedly start messing around with the color temperature and tint slider up there just pause for a moment and just think about what your intent with the image is what is your goal where is it that you're trying to get to are you trying to create a photograph that is a a facsimile of reality that has faithful and accurate color in it well if so then use the eyedropper and pick something neutral and try to remove all color casts from the photo if you are trying to just simply enhance and support the the natural authentic light that's in the image then use color temperature and tint in order to do that or if you're trying to tell a story or convey a particular mood or a particular look then use color temperature intent creatively uh just forget about the technical nature of it and just use it as a creative color tool okay for my next color tip I want to demonstrate for you the the Practical use of one of the most mysterious and I would imagine probably one of the most confusing panels that is available in Adobe Lightroom classic I don't believe this is available in the cloud version of Lightroom unfortunately I think this is a classic only thing some of you may already know exactly what I'm talking about and that panel is the calibration panel I actually use the calibration panel so much that I moved it from the bottom of the develop view all the way up to the top because I like to use it at the beginning of an edit we're going to edit an image here and I'm going to show you like a creative use for it but let's begin with the technical and let's take a look at what it is that this panel actually does in case you don't you know totally understand it every single Pixel that you see on screen has red green and blue in it even like a pure red pixel has green and blue it may be zero percent green and zero percent blue but green and blue are still part of the equation or still part of the recipe of that color and that red green and blue recipe is part of every single color every single Pixel that you see on screen so what's interesting about the calibration panel is that it is a global color editing tool that changes the recipe of each pixel it moves the red green and blue percentages like the quantity of red green and blue in each pixel it moves it around to create other colors so if we begin with red primary here and just push this all the way to the right you'll see that not only is the color of red changing to more of an orange color but all of the other colors in the color wheel are changing as well because we're changing the percentage of red that is within each color same thing happens if we go in the opposite direction if we go further towards magenta red turns more magenta but the other uh the other colors change as well and you can especially see it when you're just ramping this back and forth quickly now the same thing happens with the other primaries this is green uh you know pushing this more towards green which creates more of a like a pastel kind of a kind of a look and if you go the opposite direction well you know the colors begin to get a little bit warmer with green pushed more towards yellow and then with blue if we push this towards cyan this is the crazy one blue primary always just seems to do some pretty wild things obviously it's having a very pronounced effect on the blue uh but it's really like saturating and really changing the other colors when blue primaries pushed towards cyan and if we go in the opposite direction then yeah uh if we push blue further towards purple you know they would get purple whoops then we get purple for the blues and then everything else changes as well okay so we're going to uh tone this image using the calibration panel now what I recommend doing this is at least what works for me is to come up here and just crank up these primary channels just you know push red primary all the way to the right push it all the way to the left and just kind of get a sense for which direction feels right like which direction is the direction in which you know you're trying to get to creatively with the image for me neither one of these directions really appeals to me like it I I don't particularly care for what red primary is doing so let's try green and we're going to crank this one all the way up this direction to the right looks nice to me because the sky is turning more cyan that side light is turning a little more red and with the calibration panel like a little goes a long way so I could just turn this up just right about there just to give a little bit of red to that highlight and to change the Blue Sky to being a little more cyan now if I wanted to emphasize this I could just turn up the saturation sum right about there for now I think that looks pretty good so now let's take a look at Blue now as I said earlier blue primary is a little a little unwieldy a little crazy if we go all the way all the way to the right well we get this crazy purple sky if we go to the left the left is actually pretty good pushing this more towards cyan we're again getting more cyan in the sky a little more red a little more Magenta in the in the highlights which is actually pretty nice so let's bring this back to zero and I'm gonna push blue primary a little bit to the left again a little goes a long way you don't need much and let me just toggle this panel on and off and see the difference we've made just a big difference actually let's back out and look at it that is without the custom or the uh the calibration panel and that is with and you can see just how much richer the colors are now looking how much more depth and character uh we're giving to the image just by manipulating these calibration sliders okay my next tip uh and actually the next couple of tips uh are about the global saturation slider this is a slider that you see up here at the top of the develop panel in this presence box here you might look at this and think oh this needs saturation because the colors look a little flat they look a little dim which they do so your instinct may be to come over here to saturation and just start turning up saturation notice what's happening to the to the greens and even like this red and the flag here and yeah everything is starting to look like almost fluorescent and the reason the results end up looking so bad is because in digital photography when you increase the saturation of something you are also affecting its brightness the more saturation you inject the brighter that that color becomes so that's why the greens in this image just suddenly start looking fluorescent and they'll start glowing because we're also increasing their luminance when we're adding saturation to them unlike the the slider that is directly above it which is vibrant so if we just take all of that saturation out and use Vibrance instead you'll see that we are adding saturation to the image but it looks more natural Vibrance is more selective with how it adds saturation it only increases the saturation of areas that are missing saturation that are low in saturation and it avoids areas that are already saturated like this you know like this flag over here so essentially it is balancing out the saturation in the image by bringing up the under saturated areas to be more aligned with the areas that are already saturated to balance color so next step with the global saturation slider and this is something that that I frequently do that helps me out quite a lot and maybe this will help you as well every now and then like I'll come across a raw image you know like this one here and I'll be looking at it and I can't quite figure out uh like what's wrong with the color like something about it is bothering me but I can't quite figure out what it is well something you could do with saturation and this is similar to like you know listening to music can you turn up the volume in order to you know hear and isolate you know like the different instruments well you can crank up the global saturation slider all the way up just crank it all the way up to 100 and then when you do that you're able to see everything that is going on with every single Pixel in the image you're able to see all of those colors and so now I can see when looking at this image that there is like kind of an odd like a blue and purple color cast going on down here and these uh in these darker areas of the image and there might be like a little too much cyan back here in the in the background as well like I could push the yellow a little more towards Orange maybe reduce the saturation of the Blues and the aqua tones and the image there you can see like I'm already pulling some of that out and so that is like a really nice way to just turn up the volume of the song um you know in order to you know better hear what's going on and you know all the different areas okay my next color tip is to use negative luminance to add saturation and depth to your images this technique is more similar to how color mixing behaves in the real world like in um like in film and painting and when you add more color uh to a color typically that color gets darker because film and everything else is a subtractive uh color mixing environment whereas digital is additive where you add more color that color gets closer towards White it gets brighter on a screen whereas in film and paint and everything else the more colors you mix together the darker they get so we can emulate the behavior of film here by AI by pulling some of the brightness out of the image which increases its depth and gives the appearance of additional saturation so if I pull down the luminance slider of the greens here not only am I affecting their exposure like I'm bringing them down I'm making them a little bit darker but that's also increasing the depth of the of the greens it's also making them look a little bit deeper and and gives the appearance of additional saturation which if I just toggle this on and off you can see that now we're getting more green but we're adding more green in a subtractive way we're not doing it in an additive Way by injecting more saturation and making them brighter we're actually adding saturation and increasing depth by making them darker now if this isn't quite Rich enough for you you can just pull the luminance down a little bit and then maybe tick up your green just a little bit just to add some saturation into that place into that particular area maybe a little in the yellows as well and now you can see the difference so yeah very effective technique for very like natural and authentic way of adding saturation by using negative luminance all right the next color tip is to reduce the complexity of color in your raw images and I think this image here is a really good example because there is a lot of color going on in this photo I mean we have you know these Blues these dark Blues orange and yellow and green and maybe even some blue as well the thing with color is that the more colors that are present in an image the more complex the image becomes the more things there are for the viewer to be distracted by and what happens when when an image contains a lot of color and a lot of distraction well the eye typically doesn't go where you want it to go like it's not as focused on your primary subject like the thing you want the viewer to look at because it's you know the eye kind of ping-pongs all over the place because there's just a this Cornucopia of color um in the image and sometimes that's great sometimes that is actually like the the intent of the image and the purpose of the image you know you want to show the variety of color in the photo um and I think you could probably make a a fair argument that that's kind of the point of this one it's nice seeing this you know multi-layered uh landscape with this Rich variety of color in it but let's say just for the sake of argument that that's not what you want like you want to purify the image you want to simplify you kind of want to tone it down a little bit make it a little bit quieter so it's not quite as loud so that your subject stands out a little bit more well to do that what you do is come down here to the hsl panel and what you want to do here is you want to bend neighboring Hues together you know figure out what you want your target Hue to be and then anything that's near it just bend those Hues in the direction of that Target Hue so let's say for example with this one here let's say that I want to calm down all of this grass here and just focus on making everything more green well the first thing that I would do is just make green more green like I come over here to green and I can push this further in that direction and then with the yellow slider above it I'm going to push that further towards green so that now the yellows are bending more in that direction orange and bend that further towards yellow which then in turn bends it further towards green so now you can see that we've created a more uniform appearance in the landscape here like now to my eyes at least the gate sticks out uh more than it did before because I'm no longer distracted by all these competing colors in the image and all these other things that you know were distracting my eye before so this technique really is all about simplification it's all about creating a stronger more purposeful image by subtracting uh distracting things from the image by removing distracting colors from the image but without like desaturating those images we are maintaining their saturation we are keeping the colors we're just bending them closer towards other ones to create a more uniform more intentful image okay my next color tip is to mix complementary colors to desaturate and lower the the vibrancy and lower the intensity of colors in your image when you were working with color anytime you have one color and if you mix the color mix into it the color that is directly opposite on the color wheel say you have blue if you were to take yellow and mix it in with blue well that blue would then be pushed further towards neutral so let's say for example just for the sake of argument that uh that you want to like pull out some of this deep blue and purple here in the foreground like that's just not working for you well what you can do is just come over here to color grading go to shadows and take a look at the wheel and see like what is directly across well that would be right up around here uh between yellow and green on the wheel so we just put this over to here and then start turning up the saturation and watch what happens to the purple in the foreground it's getting closer to Black it's getting closer towards just neutral gray if we crank up the saturation all the way well then some of that greenish yellow color starts to get in there it's not quite right but if I just fine tune this a little bit let me see if I can find the exact complement I think it's I think that looks about right so now we have just with that one you know adjustment just by adding uh some of this yellowy green into this area or into these colors rather in the shadows we have effectively removed all of that purple blue tone so again this is a technique you can utilize a variety of different ways and I think once you get it in your head and you just remember that that the complement of a color will always desaturate it and bring it closer towards neutral well then you can use it you know for all kinds of things you could use it to you know bring down some of the color in your highlights you could use it to remove color casts from the mid-tones of your image or the Shadows whatever it may be just mix in the complement of whatever it is that you're seeing on screen and that will push that color further towards neutral uh so remember back at the beginning of this video when I said that in digital photography when you add contrast to an image you are indirectly affecting color how colors can become more saturated and so it's better to you know work in black and white and then go back to color well Adobe recently added something really interesting to uh to Adobe Lightroom in order to counteract some of the some of those changes to color that can happen when you are increasing contrast or when you're adjusting contrast and General and it wouldn't surprise me if some of you haven't even noticed this this Edition because it is really really small okay so I'm gonna come over here to the tone curve panel and I'm going to assign a classic s-curve like so I'm sure you've probably done this a thousand times in order to increase the contrast of the image as you can see it takes very little effort to completely destroy the colors in the image I mean they look terrible like everything is really muddy and dense and because of that tone curve because of the increase in contrast that we applied well what's interesting is that in newer versions of Lightroom we now have this refined saturation tool here and what we can do is bring this to the left and when we do we reduce that increase in saturation that was caused by applying that S curve we can actually take this all the way down to zero if we want to and let me just delete these control points and because then I think it'll be clear to see if we now add an s-curve and this is with refined saturation all the way down at zero you can see that we are increasing the luminance of of uh of these regions like let's say the mid-tones so I'm increasing the the luminance of the mid tones here but I'm not changing their color I'm not injecting more color more saturation into that area I'm just affecting the luminance sometimes the effect looks a little bit weird in my opinion sometimes it just doesn't look natural and it you know it's something for you to experiment with so I recommend next time that you're in here and you're applying an adjustment and you're applying a tone curve or applying some kind of contrast curve to an image play around with this fine saturation slider here and see if it produces better results for you so I hope there was at least one tip in this video that helped you out one tip that gave you a different way of thinking about color when you are editing your raw images in Adobe Lightroom if there was and if I succeeded in that goal please take a moment and give this video a thumbs up down below it would really help me out and expose more people to this video and help support this channel as well and by the way if you made it this far and you don't have Lightroom I can't imagine that but if you did uh and you want to give Lightroom a try for yourself and you've never used it there's a link Down Below in the video description you may use to download it from Adobe uh so you can be doing all the all the same things that I've been doing here greatly appreciate your time thanks so much for being here and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Todd Dominey

Views: 26,466

Keywords: landscape photography, photography, todd dominey, lightroom tutorial, lightroom editing, photography tips, photo editing, how to edit photos, lightroom tips, color editing tips, raw photo editing, raw processing, lightroom raw, adobe lightroom, camera raw, lightroom cc, lightroom tutorial 2023

Id: cXhqT1YUi2s

Length: 27min 13sec (1633 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 20 2023