6 Lightroom Classic COLOR GRADING Tricks

color grading is so much more than just pushing the vibrant sled to 100 but especially for beginners it can be a hard skill to learn so here are 6 tricks to improve your color grading skills in Lightroom color grading isn't something that happens in an instant lots of subtle changes will lead to a great image the first thing I do after opening the raw file is to check the different profiles do I want more saturation then I'll go with Adobe landscape do I want to have a more neutral look to start with then I'll go with Adobe standard setting up the profile is my starting point for all the editing that comes after by the way there are many more profiles to choose from when clicking on the browse drop down menu foreign tools is the white balance some people like to set it up correctly in camera but I prefer to play around with the temperature and the tin Sliders in Lightroom both are viable options by making use of temperature and tint you can basically set up the photo to go in three different directions you can use it the intended way to get a neutral look slash neutralized color case this can be done manually but for an accurate result I suggest using the eyedropper tool on a neutral area where the red green and blue values are almost identical I however usually prefer to be a bit more creative with the white bullets as an example for sunsets I like pushing the temperature somewhere to give the overall shot more warmth bringing up the tint can help intensifying sunset colors as well in certain cases bringing the temperature down in the other direction works great for dark pictures I love this cold look especially on foggy winter scenes like this while color grading in Lightroom is mostly done globally for the whole image don't overlook the power of masking after the profile and the white balance adjustments this is usually my next step in the color grading process with masking you can adjust colors in targeted areas of the photo to me that's especially helpful when working with sunsets or sunrises with warm and cold color present in the frame both the radial and linear gradient masks are a big part of my workflow here using the linear gradient I can make sure to keep the colder colors towards the darker sides by playing around with the temperature using the radial gradient I can comfortably enchant the bright Sunset light so I can make this specific area warmer by simply bringing up the white balance temperature or I could even add a very specific color with this little hidden box down here one thing that is often overlooked when it comes to color grading is the tone curve in the first place it's a great tool to add contrast but going into the specific color channels the tone curve helps to create awesome colors again I want to take a sunset shot as an example I can make the image warmer by going into the red Channel and simply drag the points for the highlights slightly to the left this gives the brighter Parts a subtle red color cast going into the blue Channel and slightly dropping the points for the highlights adds more of a yellow color cast of course this can also be applied to the Shadows by manipulating the black point of the tone curve the cool thing here is you can always guess the results before any adjustments since the colors in the corner indicate what will happen hsl adjustments are another thing I regularly use when color grading these tools are pretty straightforward with Hue you change a color tone saturation makes the color more vibrant and luminance affects the brightness of a color however there are a few tricks which help me over the years shooting Landscapes that will most likely be sky in the image going into the blue hour it sometimes happens the sky comes with a very slight purple color cast this is something that really bothers me but fortunately it's easily fixed by bringing down the purple hue and thus you'll get a pure blue tone in the sky in the luminance tab I often bring down the blue luminance to make the sky darker and thus I'm just adding a bit more contrast however Bringing Down the luminance also will increase its saturation and at the same time bringing the luminates up will reduce its saturation now on to the greatest tool that ever existed the splitonic I absolutely love it because it's super easy to use yet it hugely improves the colors of an image at this point the split toning isn't named split toning anymore since a few versions it can be found under the color grading tab at the very top you will find the most important settings the highlights the mid-tones and the Shadows we also have a more compact overview and a global color setting which I only rarely use let me show you another Sunset because here we'll get the best results when working with the sunset image the highlights and the mid-tones tend to be the warmest parts we can enchant that by simply adding summer warmth on top and thus really bringing out the colors so for most of my sunrise and sunset shots I use pretty much the same settings let's begin with the highlights for both the highlights and the mid-tones I'm going to choose a warmer color tone so in the highlights I'm going to first adjust the Hue let's bring it up and I'm usually going with a very warm color tone some with the yellow to Red range once I've set up the Hue for the highlights I am usually going with a very high amount of saturation and as I bring up the slider you can see especially in the clouds how we will add a lovely color tone to them so let's bring up the saturation a bit more and I think that looks so much better as we have set up the highlights now let's switch over to the mid tones and again first off we need to adjust the Hue for the returns I can go over the more orange like color tone somewhere around here and usually I tend to go lower on the saturation for the mid tones so let's raise them a little bit that looks like a great spot and at this point we can add a little bit of color contrast by using the Shadows so as we used warm color tone for the mid tones and the highlights somewhere in this range I want to go on the opposite side of the color wheel somewhere in the blue range for the Shadows so let's bring up the hue and set it somewhere here around the blue color tones for the Shadows I usually tend to go with a very low amount of saturation because otherwise it looks quite strange quite fast now once I deactivate the split toning you can see how much of a difference this is and I hope at this point you understand why this is by far my favorite tool in Lightroom at this point you might wonder what are those other sliders doing well luminance just like in the hsl tab affects the brightness which means by adjusting this slider you can further tweak the exposure and contrast of an image the blending and balance sliders are a little more interesting although I also rarely use them keep in mind there is just one blending and balanced ladder for the highlights the midtones and the Shadows unlike the Hue saturation loon and sliders for each tonalities so if I bring up the blending this will stay the same even when I'm switching the categories up there so increasing the blending slider will make the whole split toning effect stronger the balance slider on the other hand tells Lightroom to put more weight into the Shadows by bringing it down or the highlights by bringing it up now let me give you a quick example of split toning for a darker cold image of course here even the highlights are cold so it doesn't make any sense to try and bring in any warmth in this case what I want to do is to just work on the shadows and the mid-tones for both of them I'm going to apply a blue color to make the image colder however for the Shadows again I am only using a very very low amount of saturation while for the mid-tones I can easily bring up the saturation and by doing this you'll see I can create a very cinematic look very quickly alright and those were the six tricks and tips I wanted to show you for your color grading workflow in Lightroom I hope this tutorial was helpful and interesting if you have any questions left as always feel free to ask in the comments and thank you very much for watching this video

Channel: Christian Möhrle - The Phlog Photography

Views: 91,687

Keywords: photography, lightroom tutorial, photography post processing, lightroom post processing, landscape photography, landscape post processing, photoshop beginner, lightroom for beginner, the phlog photography, christian möhrle, how to edit raw photos, raw photo start to finish, adobe lightroom classic class, adobe lightroom class, lightroom color grading tutorial, how to color grade in lightroom, color grading photos

Id: g3bcj9R_WVA

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 26 2022