Color Grading vs Split Toning: What's the difference?! (Adobe Lightroom Classic)

hey there lightroom has brand new features that are intimidating to some and super helpful for other people if you're freaked out by color grading in lightroom i have some tips and tricks and great news to share with you hey there i'm caitlin james welcome to my youtube channel this is the place where we love to empower photographers to build profitable and purposeful businesses while also letting you in in a little behind the scenes of our everyday life so today i'm going to talk about something that left a lot of people in our kj education facebook group freaking out the day it was released p.s if you are not a part of the kga education facebook group there's about 9 000 ish photographers in there that are amazing they're encouraging and complimentary and they help one another without being negative and rude so you should join there's a link below to join you don't have to be a student you can you just have to be a kind nice person that genuinely wants to grow that's the only restrictions that we have so anyway join that facebook group but also i i wanted to speak to the problem people are freaking out over color grading in lightroom the day this was released this new update to lightroom was released people were losing their minds in this group and i have to admit ty and i exchanged some text a friend of mine also texted me like what the heck is going on with lightroom and it was a little intimidating at first but then i realized after doing some research after editing some after trying out this new feature in lightroom i actually realized that lightroom has given us adobe has given us a huge gift because this new color grading feature in lightroom is actually better than what we had before but you have to understand why it's better what it has to offer and how you can actually use the techniques that i've been teaching in the past for years you can still use those options it just looks a little different side note for those of you who may have no idea what i'm talking about every year there are updates to lightroom but there's once a year where there's a pretty significant update that comes out and so that happened this past september i teach in our kj consistency course um kgl access when i do editing demos i am constantly encouraging photographers to try split toning it's kind of one of the secret sauces to my skin tones so split toning in lightroom with this new update was completely um renamed and restructured and redesigned it looks nothing like what it used to and so at first glance it feels like my secret sauce that i've been teaching for forever was completely gone that's not the case however so i want to explain what this huge shift was all about because for someone who doesn't understand the power of split toning this probably didn't even affect you but for someone who uses it every day when i'm in my office this this was huge so that is a little back story on what has actually changed in lightroom let's dive in and talk about what has changed what is different and why we don't need to be freaked out about it instead we should be excited for those of you who have no idea why this panel in lightroom is beneficial i'm going to explain that first so basically we all know that you can adjust temperature here right you can adjust temperature but look at how that temperature is applying it's applying over the entire image so the warmth of the sunlight the green grass in the background the foreground the shadows the highlights the mid-tones everything is changing and being affected by this white balance adjustment okay so and same with tint right so same with tint if you were to do that slider back and forth i'll just show you it's affecting every single part of the image the powerful part of using split toning which is now known as color grading uh is that you are in control of changing the temperature and the tone of different parts of the image and so what has changed in this new update well i think it's a great update i'm pleased with it i'm excited to share with you um how i am using it differently and i know that as i continue to edit and continue to shoot i'm going to learn more and more about color grading that i didn't know before and so this has only been out for a few weeks but i can share with you the benefits of why i think this new color grading option is great so when you first open your new version of lightroom you will probably see color grading show itself like this and in my opinion um this is not my favorite view i would rather see them individually so you can click right here and you can see over here if you were to click here it shifts over to mid tones you click again it shifts over to highlights but you can also click up here as well this is um kind of a global adjustment and i do not use it i don't use it because i've never had a need for it but i might in the future you never know i don't fully understand it like how it would benefit me versus doing what i'm doing in each of the three sections already so i overall i'm not worried about global i'm not going to talk through that if you have knowledge about why global is better than uh adjusting manually the mid-tones highlights and shadows then leave it in the comments leave a link i'd love to learn more so um i'm gonna click shadows here the reason why i like viewing it this way and having more control is because i have found in a lot of ways that it helps me understand new parts of lightroom to break it down and simplify it in a way that doesn't look like this and by not making an overall adjustment so shadows here um when you open up shadows like this you may have your arrow turned up like this and it looks like well i gosh do i have to type in because i i teach people to find their hue and their saturation manually not to do the color picker not to kind of drag and try to figure out exactly what looks best by like selecting different parts of the image i just think that is so hard to maintain and so hard to choose so it used to be that you would see a kind of a range of sliders and i showed people where my sliders normally landed and if you want that view back you just have to open up there that's what we're used to seeing you have to open that up so you can see this view and so this is where your traditional split toning um this is what it looked like except you used to have highlights above with two lines hue and saturation and then shadows below with two lines well now you have shadows mid-tones which is new and highlights and they're all displayed in separate areas like this now you can see them all together here but you don't have the option of opening up the arrow and having this slider like what we're used to and so i still prefer to see it this way in the past i have taught that highlights have more impact than shadow and i do truly believe that and um the reason for that especially in my work is when you look at this image as a whole i shoot pretty wide open i shoot in bright scenarios i like bright backgrounds with like glowy light so whenever you are choosing to shoot in more of a bright setting you're going to have more highlights than you are dark patches of an image and so i'm actually going to click on over to highlights and show you how i would use color grading now so let's look at this image this image um has the pop that i like we're good with pop which i teach everybody we get your pop first then get your color straightened out because adjusting pop is adjusting the color whether you like it or not when you open up the shadows the colors are going to look different if you're going to open up the exposure and brighten the exposure on the image your colors will look slightly different so trying to figure out your color before you're figuring out your pop is actually working backwards and it's going to be very confusing so get your pop set first get your your contrast your highlights your whites you know that's what i mean by pop get that set first and then worry about fixing your color overall um this is this image is in a good place and i i know that it looks a little gray looks a little blue but i also know that i don't want to fix that with my temperature i want to fix that with split toning so um sorry let me rephrase that color grading i'm still not used to that i will get used to it with time all right so we're going to come down here let's say like 35 is the hue it's right in between orange before you get too much in like the golden greens uh you know that's a really safe spot to be um and let's actually do like 20 okay so i'm going to actually bump this up i want to show you how this is affecting certain parts of the image okay so we are adding this hue at this saturation to the highlights of the image only i think that looks much better we're getting a little bit warmer let's go on to shadows which i don't think in this image especially in this image it's not going to make as big of an impact i'm going to do 12 percent and we'll do 35 as well you can change you can change the hue of what you're adjusting and color grading it doesn't always have to be the same um and i actually think that can be really powerful in certain scenarios where maybe the mid-tones of the image really need to be adjusted mid-tones are basically let me explain this highlights are the brightest part of the image shadows are going to be your darker parts of the image and mid-tones are everything else in between there are actually a lot of mid-tones um and so the fact that lightroom has given us the capability to adjust that in between that mid-tone area is actually really power it's a powerful tool tool for us so in this image because my images are so bright a lot of times i don't find um that see okay see how this adjustment what is it adjusting pants the shadows of her hair a little bit of the shadows of him and a little bit overall but basically it's it's not a huge impact so i'm not worried about shadows as much but let's come over here and let's do like um let's say we'll just keep it the same 35 for the hue now look how much this adjusts mid tones are a huge huge impact over the whole image because there are more mid-tones than there are highlights and there are shadows so the fact that we can change just the color of mid-tones is fascinating and we've never had that control like this before and i love that so i think that is a huge upgrade i'm going to increase this just a little bit i feel like we have more control here i feel like if you have an image where you think gosh something is just off you can test out instead of just basically having control over the highlights you now have this secondary tool where you say okay well maybe my highlights aren't catching that really really weird green tint maybe the mid-tones have more of that and i need to adjust mid-tones more intensely than i am adjusting my highlights so we just have so much more freedom the other cool thing that i love and i'm not going to get into blending and balance because to be truthful i i have not played around with that enough to really feel like i have advice to offer but i will say that i'm loving the luminance slider so i'm loving the luminance slider because i love that it kind of gives me in my opinion it gives me another kind of secondary way to get a little extra pop so if i was to say okay let's increase this like 15 percent um you can see you can see a little pop but here let me show you do you see what what is happening here so it's giving me the ability to take the brightness and the darkness of the mid tones up and down and that's just a very different way to get a little bit extra pop than just using the tonal curve and so that's something we've never had before and that's not something that's just exclusive to mid-tones it's actually i'm a part of the highlights as well which is fascinating so if you want to shoot and you want to mute um you want to mute your highlights a little bit more maybe you're more film-like look at that adjustment it's very it's fascinating and um i never knew that i would like a new tool in lightroom until i started playing around with this and i thought man like i think this is great i'm not intimidated by it i'm not worried about it i actually think it's a great improvement in the system so overall i am still approaching split toning color grading uh the same way that i always have i just feel like i have more control and more options and so i hope showing you this um is allowing you to see just how great this up update is and that we didn't lose anything we really just gained a whole bunch of new stuff and that's awesome so if you've always been a split toning lover you're going to love color grading and i would highly recommend getting to know your mid-tone options and playing around with luminance a little bit and figure out how it can enhance the style that you already love or how it can help you achieve a style that maybe you've never achieved before so if you have an image where the the skin tones look blue or gray or they're just dead and lifeless you need color grading in your life alright so i hope that that demonstration and that little tutorial will allow you to feel more empowered and equipped and excited to use color grading in lightroom um instead of feeling maybe a little sad and intimidated uh that so much has changed because really we have so many great options now that we've never had before so i'm glad you tuned in make sure you subscribe so we'll do other videos about how lightroom is changing how it's affecting my editing in the future thank you for watching make sure you subscribe and thanks for tuning in bye [Music] you

Channel: Katelyn James

Views: 22,421

Rating: 4.8348389 out of 5

Keywords: split toning vs color grading, Katelyn James, Katelyn James Photography, split toning for skin lightroom, split toning, lightroom color grading panel, new color grading tool lightroom, split toning lightroom, split tone, split toning lightroom tutorial, lightroom color grading, Wedding Photography Education, split toning missing, color grading in lightroom, photo editing, lightroom tutorial, color grading, post processing, Lightroom 2020, adobe lightroom, Lightroom classic

Id: DCYjDeRI6lU

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020