5 PRACTICAL Uses for Color Calibration in ACR & Lightroom

there's a tool in lightroom and adobe camera raw that very little people actually use which is quite a shame because it's one of the most versatile tools that you have in your post-production toolkit in this video today i'm going to show you five very practical uses for the calibration tool in adobe camera raw and lightroom and how it can be used for many things from a slight color boost to things like fixing images that don't have a whole lot of color in it that you need more color from wildlife photos of all things skin tones yes and using it as a way to refine all of the colors in your image at the end of your workflow so we're just going to dive right on in here this is the first image i'm going to talk about with the color boost now i have a whole video on this calibration tool so i'm not going to go into the weeds on how this thing works too much however if you are interested on the deep dive of the calibration tool you can look in the description below and i'll also put it in the end screen at the end of this video so for you you might have your setup here look a little bit different than mine i have mine set up like this for a very specific reason yours the calibration might actually be on the bottom okay but the calibration tab what we can do here is you see red primary green primary and blue primary so if i just want a slight boost in this i can just take the saturation of the red green and blue pixels up a little bit just to give you an idea of why this is going to work and how it works if we hover over anywhere on our image and then we look up at that pretty new little histogram in the new adobe camera raw we can see that there are in this spot where i am hovered over right now there are 58 red pixels 84 green pixels and 82 blue pixels so remember that for this little cyanise green looking area if i boost the saturation in the primary of the blue section you're going to see that we're going to get a slight boost in that color there as well let's just take another 31 boost here to the greens and then another 31 boost here to the reds by initially looking at this it doesn't seem like we're actually boosting a lot if we turn the eyeball off you can see that we did get a good color boost here one of the ways that i use this though is to really drastically increase a specific color here to see where i'm going to get the most color out of this image now looking at this image now especially with the blue primary down there you see these rocks are getting a beautiful color added to them as well as the inside and the interior of the boat and the sky in the background of the image now obviously if we're just going with a slight color boost we might want to go down to something like just plus 40 on here now you can also use the hue of these individual colors here too if you want to push those colors kind of closer together so if we look at the blue primary here this one's going to move pretty fast but let's say we want this to be kind of like that cyanis orange color there we're going to move the hue of the blue pixels to the left a little bit and then we can look at the green pixels and see what we're going to get on that hue shift um not much of a difference there and then the red hue shift as well depending on if we want this to be more towards the yellow or more towards that orangish color now if i click on the eyeball here you can see that we definitely got a nice color boost for this image and that's nothing different than images like this this is a foggy day in yosemite and here i want to get a much better color boost for these things but because there wasn't a whole lot of light there to shine on those evergreen trees it's not showing up very well in this image but if i go into the calibration section here i can start to manipulate these red green and blue saturation sliders now if we look over why are the greens getting a boost with the reds well again there are 87 pixels of red within this green area here i'll zoom in even closer so we can see that let's zoom in to like let's go even further like 400 percent here and looking at this spot right here there's 101 red pixels 99 green pixels looking right here 88 red pixels 100 green pixels shifting the saturation level of the pixels so i can boost the greens here a little bit see what we get from that and then also the blues and you can see we get a much nicer more vibrant color happening here and then i'll modify the hue a little bit as well now with an image like this you could even take these pretty high up now why would i do this at the very beginning of my workflow well this sets me up right now to then go into something like my color mixer and then dial my colors in accordingly or go back to the basic adjustment here and also be able to dial in my white balance to make it more accurate as well so using the calibration adjustment with the color mixer and the white balance tool here we can drastically transform the way this image looked if we look at the before and then look at the after we get a nice color boost in our image that sets us up for success in the future of the post-production that we're gonna do with this image afterwards is this image what i would consider done i would not consider it done at all i would actually move forward with this but i'm not gonna push this any further we're gonna move on here because this is not about that this is about how we can use this practically in many different scenarios so looking at this image it's a wildlife photograph this is a beautiful bald eagle flying around in washington with a slightly overcast sky and if we look at our basic adjustments here you can see that we don't really have any boost to our colors so what i'm going to do is go into the calibration and again experiment that's what i do here i just boost these colors up and look at that when i boost the reds up look at how we get a beautiful color on the beak of that bird now obviously we could go in the color mixer and try to push that first and then go into calibration but calibration actually happens before the color mixer so if you do it afterwards you're gonna get some really nasty jpeg artifacts that would show up there so by starting in calibration and then moving into color mixer we can get a better more accurate rendering for our color but that doesn't stop there let's take a look at our greens even boosting the greens gives us a really nice look on this bird's beak i mean look at the color that we're getting from this by boosting this from the calibration section now let's go and zoom back out and then we'll go ahead and increase our saturation for the color blue again we also have hue at our disposal that we can change for the red green and blue primary if we need to i don't think we really need to do that there but look at the starting point that we get now for our colors in even in wildlife photography specifically for bald eagles or birds with yellow beaks but also look at the color that we're getting on the feathers of the bird as well now this is a much better approach than just try and start with the hsl color mixer and try to get that saturation out from here again because you're going to get some of that jpeg artifacting if you try to push this as far as you can here push it in the calibration section because you're actually modifying those pixels first now i'm going to press done because the next things that we're going to be doing are going to be taking place here in photoshop i also want to talk about using this for skin tones so let's say we've done our workflow and we're at the end of our workflow or we're just starting here in photoshop and we want better skin tones for uh our portrait work i'm gonna press command control j on here you could also if you had a bunch of work underneath this like curves adjustment layers and stuff make a stamp of all of your work that would go on top but the thing you want to consider here is make sure that you do duplicate that work and the reason why you want to duplicate that work is because we might need to adjust the opacity on this in the future so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to go into adobe camera roll as a filter i'm going to go up to the filter section and then adobe camera raw filter now once we pop open here in adobe camera raw as a filter i'm not going to do anything else here because i'm actually not working on raw data i'm working on pixel data that has happened later so this isn't actually modifying the rgb pixels and the raw level this is just using this calibration section that is here in adobe camera raw to boost the skin tones now what i want to do is just zoom into these skin tones this is an adobe stock image she looks very serious she looks like a like maybe like a disney princess or something like that rapunzel the next movie i guess so we're going to increase the saturation here on the reds and look at how the skin tones start to look like a more natural skin tone that we would have for her facial features here now of course we can always go into the saturation of the greens as well and maybe even the saturation of the blues as well to get more of that life in that skin tone now this obviously might have been a creative approach from this individual whoever created this image to get the skin tones to look like that or it might be one of those cases where you take the picture your white balance is slightly off and you want to get your skin tones back this is a phenomenal approach for that what i'm also going to do here is press alt or option on the mask now i've got a mask on this so let's say i didn't want her hair to get that yellowish tinge that it got to it and i just want this to be in her skin i can then brush on her skin with a white brush just brush in the areas where she does have actual skin tones and i can fluctuate how hard my pressure sensitivity is here so that i can get really accurate uh brush strokes here on where i want that skin tone to pop more than others okay and i'll get slightly here on her neck and chest area with trying not to push too far into the color of her hair now i did say that this is the benefit of doing it this way is that we have it on a separate layer which means that if this skin tone is too much we can always drop this opacity a slight bit so we get the best of both worlds we still get that nice color work that we had whether it was for creative effect or not but we get more life in those skin tones we also got more life in the color of her eyes as well look at the difference there maybe it's her skin tones that are making her eye pop there but much better skin tones now based on you know monitor calibration and all the other variables these skin tones might look different on your screen than they look on my screen but just experiment with it because you can get some really beautiful skin tones using the calibration tool whether in raw or you're working in photoshop and you need it at the very end of your workflow or somewhere in the middle for that matter now here's another example of how we can use this at the end of our workflow so i'm going to go ahead and increase my layers palette here so you can see this this image here is a lot of work that i have done on this photograph to get it to be the way that it is so if i press alt or option and turn this off this is what it looked like coming out of adobe camera raw and then i did all this work here to get a lot of that color work back and i did a lot with color but then i started experimenting with this calibration technique so watch this i'm going to press ctrl shift alt and e command shift option e on a mac to create a stamped layer of all the work that's happening underneath so what that means is that this is basically a carbon copy of all of that work now i can go to filter adobe camera raw filter and guess what i'm going to use well this whole video has been about calibration so if you haven't answered that question then yeah attention to details is important so what we're going to do here is i'm going to look at these painted hills this is actually in badlands national park and these hills just glow at night and it's beautiful they are kind of dull in the afternoon but at night as that sun starts to go down you get that gradual light that just kisses the side of it they look beautiful okay so to get that natural color i'm gonna zoom in here and and see these painted hills here and just boost the saturation in the reds boost the saturation in those greens and then boost the saturation in those blues and look at the color that we're getting there now now if i turn this off here's the before here's the after like i said especially when you're in adobe camera as a filter it's okay to push it to a high level because what do we have at our disposal we have things like the color blend mode the luminosity blend mode linear light blend mode all the blend modes in the in photoshop along with opacity and fill and things like blend if so i will take things to an extreme and also use masking and other techniques to get that to look good so one of the things that might happen with that is you might get a slight shift and all that tonal work that you did if you don't want this shift in the tonal work you just press the color blend mode here and that will ensure that what happens in this is only the color work you won't get any shift in any of the tones that have happened underneath you're just getting that color from that calibration tool being used as a color grading technique we can also use masking here to paint this in selectively or even dropping this opacity to blend them and get the best of both worlds or do a little bit of both let's say i wanted to just paint this in on the hills i'll press alt or option as i click on my mask and now i can brush with the color white very similar to what you saw in the last image on the areas where i want that glowing beautiful color to come on those hills and it'll just be on that hillside maybe even pop this in a little bit here on some of the greenery and the foreground and then a little bit on the blue in the background i really didn't like what it was doing to the light that we had here on the hills in the very back so looking at our before and after it's just that color popping even more now obviously when it comes to color grading and color manipulation you have a ton of tools that you can use in photoshop and adobe camera i just want to show you five very practical uses for the calibration tool and if you want that deep dive on the calibration tool go ahead and click on this video right here and that will show you all you need to know about this calibration tool if you haven't done so already please consider subscribing i try to take difficult things in photoshop and make them very simple and easy for you to use right now in your workflow thank you very much for taking the time to watch this i sincerely appreciate it

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 55,103

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, Calibration in s ACR, Calibration in Lightroom, What is Calibration in Lightroom, How to use Calibration in Lightroom, How to use Calibration in Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom Tutorial, Get Better Color from Raw File, How to get better colors in photographs

Id: 4ECpyh0vl4w

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021