Color Grading in Lightroom like a PRO Colorist.

hey photographers my name is Denver riddle I'm a film colorist and if you're wondering how can I make the look of my images stand out through color grading and Lightroom classic and make them look cinematic well I'm going to reveal that here in this beginner crash course using the grading tools adopted into Lightroom from the film world I'm going to be sharing with you the same grading Secrets I revealed in a blockbuster tutorial for Adobe Premiere that's helped millions of filmmakers those Secrets now for Lightroom all my life VI spoken your words have been so broken I've been under your hypnosis cell phone became your brother internet replace your mother we're going to create these amazing looks you'll be able to download these as presets and easily apply these to your own images also while YouTube is a great resource for learning about all different kinds of subjects if you're looking for a shortcut to getting this cinematic look in Lightroom I want to let you know about a plug-in we've developed for Lightroom that allows you to do point and click color grading right within the viewer it has Scopes beyond the histogram scope and enables you to apply Luts or lookup tables without any kind of workarounds to learn more just click the link below to check out photog grade all right let's do this thing ha inside Lightroom you can see I've already imported a bunch of photos into the library let's pick the first one we want to color grade and hit develop to go to the develop module on the right hand side we have the histogram scope and below the edit crop heel red eye and masking panels because this tutorial is about color grading we'll leave it parked at the edit panel which contains all the color correction and Grading tools before we jump in and start grading this thing let's discuss basic terminology for how we Define color the three basic terms that we use to define color are Hue saturation and Luma Hue is the name we call colors saturation is the intensity or vividness of a hue and Luma is the brightness or shade of hue it's also important to know how to read the Scopes which can be super beneficial in the case of Lightroom and other photo edit Ting programs there's only the histogram scope however the histogram scope is still useful for analyzing the Luma and chrome intensity of an image and provides a visual representation helpful in balancing shots in the shadows midtones and highlights the histogram is read from left to right with the Shadows at the left and the highlights on the right the Luma values of the red green and blue channels are read as though the pixels are stacked on top of each other from the bottom to the top with the least amount of luma represented in the trace on the left and the greatest amount of luma on the right there are other helpful Scopes like the waveform the RGB prade and the vector scope that are used every day by professional colorists in the video and film industry these are game changers for evaluating the exposure saturation color balance and skin tones in a more detailed way though you don't find these in Lightroom they are however available through photog grade the plug-in that I mentioned earlier now before diving into each of these tools let's talk about workflow the color griding process is divided into two stages color correction or base Cor correction and color grading or creative look in the color correction stage we're just looking for any image issues and then correcting them so that it looks natural the same way our eyes perceived it when the image was captured as part of color correction we first correct the exposure or brightness of the image second the white balance or color temperature if there are any issues and lastly the saturation by either increasing or reducing it then comes the second stage the color grading where we intentionally give the image a particular style mood or Vibe this is the creative fun part where we can push in or out colors play around with contrast and saturation in a stylized way that creates a unique look that sets you apart this will make more sense as we get into it let's start first with color correction inside the basic tab which is divided into three sections white balance tone and presence again the first step for color correction is exposure or brightness which means we'll start in the tone section it has six sliders the black control adjusts the darkest parts of the image or the pixels at the far left of the histogram the whites control adjusts the brightest parts or the pixels at the far right of the histogram the Shadows control affects the tonal range between the shadows and the midtones and you would use it to either darken or recover detail in the shadow areas the highlights control affects the tonal range between the midtones and the highlights or the upper part of the tonal range for either brightening or recovering detail in the Highlight areas exposure controls the general exposure that image and contrast the general contrast looking at the histogram we see that most pixels are sitting toward the left side since all of the section of the photo is a bit dark while the rest of the pixels sit far to the right representing this area of the image that is almost blown out so let's recover detail in the brightest areas for that I'll bring the white slider all the way down there are certain areas where there's no more detail to recover but it still makes a huge difference gaining much more detail here next I'll bring the blacks up just a bit to make sure we get as much detail as possible in the deepest Blacks next to get a bit more brightness in the shadows we'll use the shadow slider and then bring the highlights down just a bit with the Highlight slider there's no need to make any further exposure or contrast changes so we'll leave those sliders alone later on I do intend to add more contrast to the image as part of the final look but for right now I'm happy with how natural or realistic this looks this is the first step next we'll fix the color temperature since the image is looking cool and has a heavy magenta tint we can fix it manually with the temperature and tint sliders or do it automatically using the Color Picker to click over a gray neutral area I think this area of the sidewalk will work that did a great job now if for whatever reason we're not happy with the result we can still manually adjust those sliders to our liking in this case I think we can cool down the image a little bit and dial back the green tint and that's the second step of color correction let's take a look at the before and after of what we've done so far using this eye IC icon at the top left of the tab that's a huge difference now let's get into what Lightroom calls presence there are five sliders here texture is used to enhance detail so it can be used to either reduce the detail in skin tones or to bring up the detail in leaves or wood in this case we don't need that much but if I bring it down slightly it softens our subject's skin then comes Clarity which affects the contrast in the mid tones so if I increase it just a bit it makes the subject's face pop making it look more three-dimensional dehaze I won't touch but it's for removing atmospheric Haze through contrast Haze can be caused by sunlight hitting the lens smoke or simply the air when looking at a distant Mountain then comes the third step of color correction or saturation the Vibrance and saturation sliders are related saturation brings up all the colors in the image and as you can see here it really messed up the skin tones on the other hand vibrants affects the saturation while protecting the skin tones so it has more of a mild effect I'll bring it up a bit just to make make the colors feel a bit more alive and that is our base color correction let's look again at the before and after you can see this makes it look natural without adding any kind of stylized look we went from having exposure and white balance issues to a photo that you could share or print but this isn't going to set you apart and it doesn't look cinematic so now it's time for the fun part where we can start building a look a specific style or color grade for that we'll bring in the tone curve tab here's a quick crash course on how curves work the bottom Point adjust the Shadows the top Point adjusts the highlights and we can create as many points in between as we want to shape the tonal range in this case we don't want to affect the deepest shadows and brightest highlights too much so we'll create contrast in the in between areas known as undertones overtones and midtones I'll make a point here in the midtones and drag it up this improves our exposure but makes the undertones look a little washed out so let's create a point here and drag it down to adjust the density of the undertones or Shadows I'll then create a point here and drag it up giving it a bit more brightness to the highlights this is known as an S curve and it's the base for the Cinematic look giving it natural Punchy looking contrast without making the Shadows too dark and the highlights too bright another common characteristic of this cinematic look is a gentle rolloff in the highlights film doesn't have extreme highlights instead there's an organic rolloff where they often appear muted and retain texture and tonality to accomplish this we'll bring the top Point down creating a nice gentle curve like a shoulder creating that gentle rolloff the same goes for the Shadows on film often the deepest Shadows look slightly elevated but never pitch black colorists refer to this as milky blacks and it gives it a vintage characteristic to accomplish this we'll bring the bottom point up creating a knee so far we've used only the Luma curve which affects only luminance or the brightness and darkness of our image but we have three other curves here for the red green and blue channels we can use these three curves to create a similar S curve to make colors a bit more Punchy or we can use them to introduce specific colors to the tonal range for example going into the blue curve we can create a point for the overtones and drag it down to make the highlights look warmer then we can go to the red curve and pull down on the undertones to introduce teal finally we can go to the green curve create points for the overtones midtones and undertones and drag the midtones and undertones up a bit to introduce some green the added green is a common characteristic of some film stocks in this particular case I want to explore other tools to introduce specific colors to create the look so I'll delete the points created in the red green and blue curves and move on to the next tab hsl here we can control the Hue saturation and luminance of specific color ranges for example let's say we want the leaves to be darker we'll go into the luminance and bring the values for green down the skin tones are looking a little reddish so we'll move into Hue and because skin tones sit usually on the orange range I'll move the orange slider towards yellow effectively removing some of that red from the face there's still some red in the neck area so we'll use the red slider to move the Hue towards orange and I don't like that the leaves look yellowish so I'll move the yellow slider towards green jumping back to the saturation section I see a lot of purple and magenta in this area of the sidewalk so I'll bring the saturation sliders down for those colors I also don't like the blue tint on his T-shirt and the wall so I'll bring the saturation for the blue down too in doing this we're starting to create a color palette for the image most of it is made up of green and yellow mainly the green leaves are subject and a bit of the background while everything else like the sky wall and sidewalk look neutral let's look at the before and after of this grade the subject now stands out more giving us a nice contrast between him and the darker leaves we're going to keep pushing towards this look using the next tab which Lightroom calls color grading this tab is made of three color wheels for shadows midtones and highlights and a fourth wheel called Global which affects the whole image these tools are modeled after the traditional telesin controls found in color correctors for video and we can use these either for color Corrections or for a stylized grade up until this point we've been modifying the existing colors of the image but now we can use the wheels to push colors into the three ton ranges of Shadows midtones and highlights using the Pucks in the middle of each wheel we can also modify the luminance for each of the tone ranges with the sliders below each wheel because I want to keep pushing this towards a warm look I'll use the highlights wheel to add more yellow and then push some blue into the Shadows to compensate and to create some color separation I want the skin tones to keep that warm Vibe so I'll push some yellow into the midtones below the wheels you'll find two sliders blending which modifies the amount the three total ranges blend effectively making each range wider so if I bring the blending value down you'll notice that the yellow highlights affect less of the areas closer to the midtones and if I bring the value up yellow starts to invade the midtones and even the shadows in this case I'll just leave it at its default value of 50 balance is pretty much the same but in a more aggressive way pushing to the right the color values from the highlights start invading the whole image pushing to the left the color values from the Shadows start tinting everything again I'll leave it at its default value of zero then we have a tab called detail for sharpening and transform for cropping scale and rotation we won't go into that as it's not part of color grading then lens Corrections for fixing chromatic aberration and Distortion some lenses May introduce the effects is for adding vignetting and Grain and these we will use in the look we're going for we can control the amount of vignetting midpoint roundness feather and we can even make sure the vignette doesn't affect the highlights as much I won't go deep into each slider just remember vignetting helps Focus the attention of the viewer towards a model or an object in the frame looking at the before and after you can clearly see how the vignette pushes our eyes towards the subject and finally grain if you're trying to mimic the texture of film this is where you do it so I'll add just a bit finally we have the calibration tab which lets us change the mixture of red green and blue within each pixel it's basically a way to balance the Hue and saturation of the image using the three primary colors and it can be used to make final tweaks to the color balance after doing all the specific Corrections we have made I'll use it to push the look a little further changing the red Hue more towards yellow and bringing its saturation down so it doesn't look too overpowering to regain some color contrast I'll push greens more towards till and blue and blue towards till now let's see a side by-side view of the original image and the final result by clicking on this icon at the bottom left of the image that's a major difference but we're not done yet the panel has other sections here we have a whole other section for cropping one for the healing brush to delete blemishes and other imperfections a red eye section and finally the one I'm most interested in the masking section and the reason this is so important is colors will use shape masks to do relighting draw attention to subjects or limit different effects what's neat about Lightroom is you can automatically mask a subject the sky or background so let's pick the subject and then you can perform any kind of Correction affecting only the mask subject using the same tools we've been using you can tell it to isolate a specific object just click object select a brush size and paint over the object and Adobe AI will identify and create a mask automatically for you you can create masks with linear or radial gradients or by selecting a specific range of colors or luminance but my favorite one is the brush tool with it I can paint on any part of the image and turn it into a mask for this photo I'd like to get a bit more detail in the darkest area of the subject's hair so with the brush tool I'll paint over that area and then bring up the Shadows a bit and here's the before and after this lets you be very granular in the corrections you want to make and allow you to tweak it to Perfection now I want to show you two more images that I already corrected and graded just so you can see this same procedure applied to different images this one is interesting because I made no corrections to it in the color grading tab instead to introduce specific colors I used the tone curves for turning the sky into this mix of yellow and till in the blue curve I brought the overtones down while in the red in the green curve I brought them up for the cool shadows I brought the undertones of the red and green curves down giving it a stylized crossprocess effect and moving to the mask section you can see I used a mask to desaturate the sky another one to bring the highlights down a bit just for the subject and a third mask to brighten up the Reflections in his sunglasses in this next photo I'll jump directly to the mask section so you can see how I mask the eyes to make them pop a mask on the shiny areas of the skin tones to tone them down and a mask for the reddishness on her nose to correct its Hue and saturation finally if you want to copy this correction between photos you can right click on a photo go to develop settings copy settings check the settings you want to copy move to another photo again right click develop settings and click paste settings or you can go to the presets tab on the left side click the plus icon and create a preset based on your current Corrections presets and lets are great shortcuts for color grading your photos but the only way to see what every preset does is to go one by one through them to see a preview and if you want to apply a lot Lightroom doesn't support them natively so there is a long work around you have to do in order to import them as a preset with photog grade you're able to see real-time previews of Luts and it comes with 90 built-in Hollywood colors presets and film stocks that you can see at once besides the Scopes it also has a false color feature where you can see the exposure values as sort of a heat map red is for Overexposed or clip detail purple for underexposed or crushed detail and skin tones should be in the gray green and pink areas what's so intuitive about the point and click grading is it's easy to recover detail by clicking and dragging down on the red areas and recovering detail in the shadow areas by clicking and dragging up for skin tones it's the same you also get easy batch processing for correcting and Grading multiple images at once so no more late night edit editing sessions it works in Standalone mode and as a plugin for Lightroom and photoshop on Mac and windows I'll include a link in the description below and for a limited time you can take 20% off using coupon code Lightroom 20 at checkout and in case you thought I forgot I'll also include a link to the presets for the looks that we created in this tutorial well I hope you found this tutorial helpful and it helps you to create a unique looking style that sets you apart for more grading videos hit the Subscribe button and then the Bell to be notified of our next one let's make Cinema quality [Music] images

Channel: Color Grading Central

Views: 285,162

Keywords: lightroom color grading, lightroom tutorial, lightroom photo editing, lightroom editing, color grading lightroom, lightroom cinematic editing, lightroom editing tutorial, photography color grading, color grading in lightroom

Id: NFrzxc_Py9E

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023