4 Color tools you SHOULD be using in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom

in this video i'm gonna share with you four incredible tips for making impactful colors in your image that are gonna make your jaw just drop and you're gonna ask yourself why have i not been doing this all the time in adobe camera raw or lightroom i was recently working on this photograph and i loved what i was receiving from the colors and most of it came from adobe camera raw and as i was building this image i was thinking myself man i've got to share this with you these are the four color tools that you should be using in adobe camera raw now i don't really like to shoot on anybody because i don't like it when i'm on but i really think you should do this because these are some phenomenal color tips so i'm going to go through and i'm going to show you how to use these color tools and what order you should use them on but first let's have a little discussion about color and why this is important first and foremost if you are a purist photographer you're going to hate me for this and that's fine with me you can be all high and mighty in your little purist corner because you're missing out on some really cool stuff but if you're like me and you like to create an experience for your viewer you have to understand color first and foremost we know that we change the dynamic range of our photograph all the time why that's because the camera can only capture one instance of dynamic range or said exposure at any given time therefore we need to adjust the exposure to make our photo better i sounded like a robot however what we often overlook is the fact that our camera also has to make one color decision ah it says white balance kelvin temperature set it to here it's not taking into effect that when i set this kelvin temperature it's going to offset these blues to be more yellow or these yellows to be more blue so we need to do these things not only should we do them we need to do them so the first thing i'm going to do here to start this off is show you where i would start in adobe camera roll so this is the image in adobe camera roll all i did was the basic adjustments here to get this set up so i didn't have to do that before getting into the color stuff the first color tool i want you to think about when you're working and in this order is going to be the temperature why because our white balance might not have been set properly if you're anything like me i put my camera in auto white balance because it just makes things easier so when i get in here i'm going to slightly adjust the white balance of this image i'm going to make it a little bit more yellow right about there looks good and maybe a little bit more magenta to bring in some of the warmth in there and that looks pretty good but it's just a basic touch what if i were to go in here in this color adjustment area and try to move these sliders too much i'm going to get a color shift that isn't going to look right and i'm going to be fighting that color all the time so we start here and we start low on the color temperature and then we move into some of our other color adjustments the second color adjustment that i know many people aren't even using right now because every time i show in a tutorial or a webinar they go oh my gosh that was the most amazing thing like i'm using that all the time now that maybe not with that voice that's usually my wife filter that's the calibration section so in the calibration section i don't necessarily know exactly what's happening with this but i'm going to make an assumption and you can correct me if i'm wrong what i'm assuming with this calibration section is that this is a section where you're going to calibrate the pixels of the image or what was recorded onto the image sensor now because an image resensor typically records in red green and blue or rgb i'm assuming that what's happening at this level is actually adjusting the red pixel data that was recorded the green pixel data that was recorded and the blue pixel data that was recorded and if you know anything about color in your images you know that every color is made of a little bit of red a little bit of green a little bit of blue it's actually a lot a bit of green because there's typically more green receptors on that sensor than there are red or blue so what happens here when you change the red primary the green primary and the blue primary notice how it says primary it doesn't say the actual color of red green or blue that's because i'm i'm assuming that it's getting to that pixel level and how that was recorded i don't have a sincere fact to back that up but since i've thought about it that way it has changed the way i use these sliders altogether and i've done a tutorial on this before on my youtube channel and here i'm going to go into it a little bit more so what i'd start with here is the tint of the shadow so i'm going to give the shadows a little bit more magenta okay and then i'm going to pop a little bit more saturation in those reds just to see where the reds actually are now there's red in many different places here but notice how every color is slightly shifting and slightly changing when i increase the saturation even the blue areas why because even in that blue up there there is a slight hint of red because of that red pixel sensor that was recording that data to create that color of blue see what i'm seeing there so now i can adjust the hue a little bit here to get that hue dialed in exactly where i need that red primary to be to make this more look like the badlands that i saw now i'm going to pop on down here to the green primary in the green primary we're probably going to see a lot more shift happening here with the colors because of the data that's available in those green pixels it doesn't look like it in this one too much we might actually have more in the blue but i'm just going to move these back and forth and shift them a little bit and get them dialed in exactly where i want them to do to amplify some of the color now what i'm doing here is i'm not trying to make the colors perfect in here i'm only getting two sliders for each individual color and there's only three colors here so this isn't the primary place where i'm gonna be adjusting the color and the image this is just a place where i'm gonna go to to get the baseline of the colors built that's why this is the second phase after we do the white balance stuff okay now in the blue primary watch this oh my word look at how gorgeous those blues are getting up there and they aren't getting pixelated in the process that's what would happen if we were in the hsl adjustment and we hiked up the saturation of those blues like that but here because we're actually just amplifying the amount of blue that is in those pixels that were recorded it's actually looking pretty good and here we can kind of shift and modify the hue of that blue i think it's pretty good where it is right there so that's the second thing that you should be doing with your color in your images now it's not exactly perfect yet that's where we're going to go into the next phase which is going to be the color mixer here's the before and after on that by the way holy cow so in the color mixer what i'm going to do here is i'm going to change the drop down here from hsl to color now i'm pretty well versed in color so i know what's going to happen with the colors in the image that i'm looking for to do this if you do not i would stick around here in the hsl section but i would use this targeted adjustment tool to click on different areas in your image to find out what color that is that you're going to be modifying or editing okay i'm going to hop over into the color right though because here i get a breakdown of all the colors and i think it's really cool to have these radio dials i don't know i love what adobe did here in this version of camera raw with this i actually get excited every time i get in here okay i can't contain myself so what i'm gonna do is i'm actually going to look at the overall orange right now because that would be this area right here and in there i'm going to go ahead and change or alter the color of those oranges to make them look more accurate to what i saw in the badlands which would actually be more on the yellow scale here i can also manipulate how much saturation is coming in specifically on these oranges now the color breakdown right now this is not i wouldn't say this is like the bayer matrix pixel data this is the actual physical pixel data that adobe camera raw is reading to say this color is red this color is orange so we're actually at this point modifying physical color within the image and not working with the bare matrix color okay so just to separate the the ideas here at least that's how i separate the ideas like i said i'm not a scientist but i think that's what's going on here so here i can adjust the luminance to give that a little bit more light back there in those oranges and maybe a little bit more saturation so now let's go to the yellows and let's look at the hue of the yellow and see where yellow is in this image it looks like yellow is actually going to be the little floral stuff here so i'm going to increase that a little bit pop on a little bit more saturation and then look at my adjustment there for the luminance value hue is what color do you want that color to be saturation is how potent do you want that color to be and luminance is how much white or black do you want to be present within that color so here you get to kind of mix color like a painter here i'm going to pop over into blue and i'm going to go ahead and look at the hue of the color blue up there and do something like this and then increase the saturation a little bit and then adjust the luminance and now what i'm going to do i'm going to pop over into the purples because i see some purple coming through here too and what you can do if you don't know what color it is just pop up the saturation all the way it'll tell you this is not what you want in your photo but it'll tell you okay so don't go too far with these but if you need to find out what color it is that you're working with pop the saturation all the way over and then here we can brighten up or darken down those the luminance of that purple and also shift the color of that purple too whether we want that to be more of a magenta sky or more of a blue sky we can adjust that purple and that's looking pretty good there might drop the saturation and then let's go over to magenta and see where magenta is i knew magenta would be right there in that spot that i didn't like which is right there so i can increase that saturation to match the purple a little bit and then move this a little bit more over to the hue and then i can change the brightness of that to make it a little bit brighter on the magenta notice how what we did here is we just refined the color so in the first one we set the idea of the color in the calibration we set what the pixel value should be of those colors and then with the color mixer we set exactly what we want those colors to look like i'm going to show you how important this calibration section is after i'm done with the next one so as i told you that the way our camera records color is it's not really looking at the the white balance that we are seeing and our physical eyes are seeing because we can see a differentiation of color within an image while we're there on the scene and on location but our camera has to make one set decision well guess what i know that the foreground is warmer here and i know that the background is bluer here why because i was there so now how do i fix this in adobe camera raw tip number four the graduated filter now in the graduated filter i'm just going to start off by just grabbing this and shift and clicking and going straight down this image is kind of easy because of the fact that it doesn't have much of a horizon line here or things obstructing the horizon line so with the top i can make that slightly bluer and even a little bit more magenta to bring out the magenta in that sky at this point not only am i subject to color i can actually start adjusting the highlights and the shadows of that background as well but we're talking about color today now in the foreground i'm going to go ahead and make another one here just click and press and hold shift and click it up like this now right now i'm going to press the reset button here so that it resets these corrections and i'm going to make this a little bit warmer look at that and then i might introduce a little bit more green to that foreground and then maybe a pop of some highlights there just because i can while i'm here all right so check this out this is some really important stuff we talked about the four things what was the first one white balance second one calibration third one the hsl adjustment fourth one graduated filter so let's see how these four things actually rely on one another so i'm gonna go back over here and i'm gonna press and hold the eyeball on here and turn off calibration look at the difference here oh my gosh like this is strikingly different look at this look at this wow so the calibration actually sets us up for success for using tools like the color mixer and the graduated filter now the basic settings here and what we did with this if we just change this to as shot it's going to look completely different so you see setting up the actual color that you have here in the very beginning sets the stage for all the other colors so setting your white balance sets the stage calibration makes the saturation and the brilliance of those colors pop the color mixer refines them and the graduated filter is the icing on the cake that ties it all together what you do in adobe camera all sets the foundation for everything that you do going into photoshop so getting it looking good right here is absolutely imperative click on the playlist that i have here to learn a lot more about adobe camera cc 2020 if you like it comment share it subscribe thanks for being here we learned to master photoshop and make better photographs

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 37,023

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, color in Adobe, how to use Calibration in ACR, Calibration in Lightroom, Graduated filter, Grad filter LR, grad filter ACR, White Balance, Correct white balance in ACR, correct WB in Lr, color grading ACR, Color Grading Lightroom, photoshop tutorial, camera raw, adobe photoshop, adobe lightroom, white balance, camera raw tutorial

Id: YJ6HAIfT_ec

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020