INSANE COLORS & TONES! Unlock In Lightroom Calibration Panel - Editing Tutorial

hey guys right here at signature edits and inside of today's Lightroom tutorial we just might change the way you edit your photos forever yes I know that's a big promise but every once in a while I come across a new technique inside of Lightroom that just blows my mind and totally changes the way that I'm editing my photos and when I come across that kind of technique I want to share it with you and I really think this is a game changer so are you ready let's get into it [Music] all right so let's get started with this tutorial as I said before it's probably going to change the way that you edit your photos in a really really good way and it's going to unlock some amazing colors and tones in your images that you just didn't really know you had access to before now before I go much further I know that I can sometimes go a little bit fast for people so if you have trouble understanding what I'm talking about it's going too quick for you just hit shift and the comma key on your keyboard Shift comma will slow down my voice and likewise shift period will speed up playback inside of YouTube okay so don't leave me comments about how I'm going too fast you can just slow it down or speed it up and life is brilliant okay with that out of the way we're going to dive in today to this tutorial and primarily we're going to be looking at camera calibration now I know this doesn't really sound like this amazing new trick that you've never heard of before you probably know a little bit about camera calibration you know you slide these little sliders it changes the colors you add some saturation but most of us including myself until very recently don't really understand what is happening when we're adjusting these sliders we just know you know you mess around and it makes things look different but unless you really know what these sliders are doing it's hard to unlock all of the kind of creative potential that's inside of here so we're going to dive in and kind of dissect what's going on in each of these sliders how to get the very best out of the calibration menu and how to unlock some amazing tones you didn't even know you had inside of your images okay now before we can get to the fun stuff obviously I'm going to have to explain some technical fundamentals but don't let that bore you don't tune out this is really really important because if you don't understand the fundamentals you're not going to be able to use this tool properly and you won't be able to unlock the kind of power that's really in here so please please please just give me an extra couple of minutes to go through here as quickly and simply as I can and explain what's going on with these settings so what exactly is camera calibration that's the question we probably need to ask ourselves and the answer to that is sort of complicated and the reason it's complicated is because Adobe for whatever reason has refused to put anything on their website that addresses camera calibration I've checked I've searched there is no mention of it whatsoever the only thing that there is a mention of is your camera color profile now you've probably seen this in your lightroom before where you can go in and select different color profiles that determine how Lightroom interprets the blacks the whites the shadows and the colors of your different images so for example I have some different color profiles I've custom-made for signature edits and then there's the Adobe raw profiles and you can also select if you have a image taken with a specific camera it should show different camera profiles for that particular image so here's camera matching for this camera we can select the different profiles and so part of the reason that different cameras have different colors present in their images is because of the way they interpret the colors through their camera profile so that's how you set that and then the camera calibration tab down here with these other little settings is for fine-tuning those adjustments fine-tuning the colors in your image depending on the specific lighting condition so to really understand this look at this little graph here and don't get scared it's actually pretty simple this is basically a representation of different wavelengths of light depending on the light source so if we look at our florescent example here you can see that in fluorescent light you have a lot of green and a lot of orange II kind of reds and not much of anything else with some peaks in the blues and the ACMA's right whereas our noonday light example has lots of pretty much everything it's a lot more level curve with a deep fall-off in the Reds and the violets there's not as much red or violet in a noon daylight lighting condition same for early-morning very similar but even more level except you've got more reds and more purples so the ratio is going to be different that's why sunset and sunrise early morning and late evening are going to have much deeper reds and purples in general and we get those really deep red purple skies right so the camera calibration panel actually allows us to compensate for these different issues in lighting so if you ever have an image that has this weird color cast and white balance just doesn't seem to make it look right camera calibration is going to be your best friend for example if we're shooting in a fluorescent lighting condition we know that the greens are going to be way too saturated and probably the oranges and the Reds too so we can go in here and we can grab the saturation of our greens and we can take the saturation down and you'll see that as we do that is taking the saturation of everything down in this image not just the greens but it's doing more to the greens than anywhere else so that's the difference in these different saturations as you adjust the red it will take mainly red saturation down but it will affect everything else it's going to be transparent whereas if we have the HSL saturation here and we targeted the Reds it would just take saturation out of the Reds and the Reds alone okay so let's head back here to our calibration and head over to an image example for you I've got this photo right here of our model taken around sunset this is a completely raw file and you can see that her skin is just super orange and unnatural now white balance is going to do an amazing job helping to fix that we can take it down to maybe around there and maybe add a little bit of magenta but that's about all we can do and any further it's just going to not work it makes the Blues too blue or it makes the yellows too yellow or you kind of get what I'm saying here so we're going to take it as far as we can get it with the white balance then go down to our calibration and we can adjust so right now to my eye it looks like we've got way too much blue going on in this image and probably the reason for that if we consult our chart here is because we're right around morning / sunset and that's going to mean that there are more blues and purples and reds in this image then there are around the afternoon so that's why we've kind of got that bluish cast in the shadows of this image so we can compensate for that by grabbing the saturation of our blues and pulling that back and you'll see it's affecting the saturation of everything but just because I leveled out to saturation now things look a lot more natural than they did before here's before and here's after all of a sudden everything just seems to be a lot more natural now we can go in here and we can adjust the Reds of her skin which still has kind of a green cast to it and we can grab that red and adjust in here just a little bit like that now what's the difference between doing the Reds like this with the hue and doing the Reds in the hue saturation luminance panel that's a great question for starters the red panel in the HSL is going to adjust only the Reds and the oranges only the oranges where's the calibration panel let's reset this is going to adjust everything watch as I change the red hue it changes the Blues it changes the oranges it changes everything and what's really going on when we adjust the hue with the calibration panel is we're adding more orange pretty much to everything we're just waiting red towards orange this way so you can see that we've added orange in this rection but we have also added our kind of orange yellow it's extending in the direction of the greens as well so it's changing the color of everything not just the Reds so that's the biggest difference there you got to think of calibration is really fine-tuning it for the lighting conditions whereas HSL is more fine-tuning it for your editing style most of the time practically speaking okay let's jump back into our image here obviously we've D saturated things so I'm going to add some more saturation back into the Reds just a little and into the greens now I add it in both instead of just one as we mentioned before when you adjust the saturation in one of these it's going to weight it more towards that specific color so if we do equal amounts across both of them will add saturation everywhere of course we could have just gone up to the top saturation and added a blanket saturation overall to everything you just kind of have to experiment a little bit to figure out what works best for that specific image okay so here is our before calibration and after you can see what a massive difference that made and just correcting for the kind of strange lighting cast we had in this image let me show you another example this one was taken at a concert and we've got a tungsten light of some sort coming down on to our artist here now you can see his skin is very yellow and we can start by adjusting the white balance so grab that pull it back that's looking better already and we could maybe try and add a little bit of magenta to counteract the tungsten but the skin to me still looks a little bit off it's a little bit too yellow to green so let's go down to our calibration and we're going to adjust our Reds a little bit so just take our hue just like that you can see here's before and here's after okay now we can go one step further and take this shadows a tool which is going to add saturation to the magenta or add saturation to the greens depending on which way we pull it so in this direction it's going to take saturation out of the magenta and add it to the greens and in this direction it's going to take it out of the greens and add it to the magenta and because we happen to have a purple background here it's going to really make our subject pop because as we add deeper saturation to this color our subject is going to have more contrast in color from the background and pop out of there so here's before here's after great let's head over to another indoor example here this is just a JPEG image not even a raw file and we're going to go and just adjust our white balance here and one of the places that you'll find that very most use for the camera calibration tool is when you're doing a nighttime work because sometimes white balance just doesn't do enough we've still got a weird color cast going on on our models face so I'm going to go to calibration here and take that shadow tint up towards magenta just a bit so here's before and after you'll notice we added a lot of contrast because we suddenly made these areas more magenta instead of everything being kind of green and that just adds contrast and pop to our image now we're going to go down to our Reds and tweak them probably away from yellow towards magenta a little bit bring the saturation down and greens bring the saturation way way down and then we'll add the saturation back in the Blues you can see how much more natural her skin looks here's before and here is after now I'm not saying this is the perfect edit and we're working with the JPEG image that has actually already probably had some editing done to it but you can see how we can correct for these kind of issues so here's another one where we've got a streetlight and you can see that even when we go in here let's zoom in yellow grab our white balance and maybe set a little cooler take our tint take that up to here or so zoom back out okay we're looking alright but his skin still doesn't look kind of the way that I wanted to if I warm the whole image up which I think the rest of the image needs his skin is now way too yellow and way too green so gonna go down to our camera calibration and we'll compensate for that greenish tungsten light by taking our greens and shifting it maybe towards green instead of yellow as you can see that difference right there grab the saturation bring the saturation down in the greens and then we can maybe add a little saturation in the Reds and the blues now which one you need to do in which circumstance is kind of going to depend a little bit so experimentation is probably going to be your best bet and of course it all comes down to what you want your image to look like in the first place there are two ways to use this camera calibration panel we can use it to correct lighting situations which is what it's originally designed for or we can use it to add stylistic colors to our image so for example we could take our colors and make his skin totally orange that's not natural but if it looks good to you and that's the Edit you're going for you can use it that way you got to think of calibration kind of like the EQ system in your car so you've got your stereo and we all know that your stereo has those EQ buttons but very few of us know what they're actually for which the EQ system is meant to tune those speakers to the specific listening environment of your car because those speakers will sound different in your car than they would on your desk or in your room or something like that so we can take the acoustics of our car and we can balance the EQ to make that music sound the way it was originally produced and meant to sound okay so the same thing comes to the calibration we want to think about okay what is the actual lighting conditions going on in here and how do we balance it out given our different greens reds and blues which combine to make up all of the different color combinations in our image now we're gonna go through a few more images together and show you some creative ways that you can use the calibration panel if this video has been helpful for you so far do me a huge favor hit that like button and leave me a comment below just say you know thank you or tell me a funny joke I don't care it really helps the YouTube algorithm and gets the word out there I'd love to share this tutorial with as many people as possible okay with that out of the way now that you've hit that button let's go ahead here and grab a couple more images and just show you a few examples of where this can be applied so let's look at this photo right here we've got a beautiful pond and a beautiful couple we're gonna go in here and just adjust the white balance warm things up okay and we've got a really huge green cast going on because we've got all of these leaves and green grass reflecting light onto the skin tones here as well as the entire environment everything is green so let's go into our calibration and we'll just offset for that so we'll start with our greens I'm going to pull the green saturation up the exact opposite of what you would expect because this is a little trick I've found for some weird reason if you pull the saturation of the Blues down you'll see that in addition to saturation going down everything just seems to get darker except for skin tones seem to be left brighter so what's kind of interesting about this if we pull our Reds back here kind of two and a brihat place maybe say around there and our blues let's just double back a little bit you can see that we have this nice pop in contrast our greens have now gotten darker and greener they're more saturated and then our skin is popping off the background we've created some contrast using the calibration tool and now why is that creating more contrast because the greens are now more pure green and the other colors are now more pure other colors and so there's more of a contrast between those two colors the least contrast you can have in color obviously is going to be black and white when everything is the same color or there is no distinguishing contrast between colors so using that we can enhance our colors to create more contrast now we can go in here and we're just going to grab our blues and everything in this looks a little bit too magenta II for me which means that going this way is probably the opposite of what we want we'll grab this slider and just warm those greens up now you could go away crazy overboard and do kind of a stylistic teal and blue look but we're just going to try and keep this relatively natural for the sake of this video and then our greens here they're looking pretty yellow so I could maybe make them a little bit more green and we've lost some saturation as we've done that so I'm going to compensate here bring maybe the Reds and the blues up a little bit okay and then the Reds their skin is looking pretty darn red so I'm gonna make that a little bit more Orange see how that looks it's gonna take it towards yellow maybe just a bit okay so here's before and here's after now don't pay attention necessarily to this as the perfect edit I've only just adjusted this and this alone however look at the contrast we've created in our couple how their skin and basically the subject of this photo is just popping out a lot more now you might be asking yourself couldn't we just do this with the HSL panel that's a great question let's take a look here we're going to reset everything in our calibration just shut that off and then we'll start in our HSL maybe we'll grab our greens and our yellows we'll pull that back grab our saturation here in the greens and yellows pull that up just compare okay so we've got a really nice golden feel going on with our calibration version so let's grab our hues when we take the aquas in this direction I think and then we'll grab our yellows maybe make them a little bit warmer oranges maybe a little bit towards yellow a little bit warmer okay so here's our calibration and here is our HS l now you might have a preference when it comes to the actual color itself but the point here is that they're not exactly the same so what I would encourage you to do is first adjust with your calibration and then go in later and in the HSL panel you can enhance that as far as you want so we can take these yellows maybe make them a super EXTREME and the greens maybe we'll desaturate them saturation out of here maybe add some saturation to the Blues because we're going crazy and we just don't care so here is our before now and here's our after we can make a massive difference and the nice part about doing this in the calibration first is that then the HSL is pure creative we're not trying to correct anything in here we're able to just change the colors and manipulate them however we want here's another example with blue this time so we'll grab our white balance just warm things up a little bit for this photo that looks about right go to our calibration and we will just grab our blues we'll take the saturation up this time because we want to saturate those mountains and take the saturation down in everything else just to balance it out until our skin tones look pretty natural okay here's before and here's after see how much pop and contrast we've added to this image now of course you could go in and you could try and replicate it in the HSL panel which I've done ahead of time just to save you watching me do it here's before and here's after but take a look at the difference in these image the way that the highlights are kind of portrayed in each of them now you might have a preference you might not and sometimes it'll depend on the image one will work better than others but in this particular one I think that the calibration version looks better because the skin is just a little bit brighter it's popping off the background a little more and now when I add the rest of my edits I can go in and get lots of contrast without it looking too contrasty okay let's head over to this beautiful castle so we're going to grab our white balance warm that up go to our contrast take that probably around there don't want to go too far and then get rid of this haze with Arde haze tool quick tarik don't take the D haze too high cuz then you will regret it and look like a later especially if you're recording a YouTube tutorial okay grab the contrast let's say that looks about right maybe take T haze a little bit harder what can we get away with you might be watching this thing that's way too much Ryan in which case let me know in the comments below I would love to hear from you okay so this looks alright but we've got a problem going on in our shadows it's still pretty blue and I can show you that by hitting this eyedropper and when we hover over these pixels you'll see it's pretty much a really dark blue going on in the shadows and this is trees it's forest it shouldn't be blue it should be kind of oranges greenish whatever so go to our calibration grab the shadows and just add some magenta in there to counteract that then I'm going to actually warm up these screens we'll try maybe going towards yellow a little bit that was it quite far you can see how the castle really pops out of the background as we do that the image kind of takes on some new life so we'll grab that saturation they could probably use a little more saturation but not too too much and then the Blues maybe somewhere around there oranges or reds take those down and saturation I'm kind of playing around here eyeballing it and seeing what looks good let's say something like this okay so maybe add a little bit more contrast just by lowering the blacks raising up the whites something like that here's before and here's after we'll take our calibration turn that off for you and on now it's not making a huge massive difference but it is making a pretty solid difference we already thought we had the white balance dialed in but once you add those calibration adjustments and take them away wow we were way off and just using white balance alone probably wouldn't have gotten us there all right just a couple last examples here we'll go back to our forest photo I've already grabbed the white balance and fix that as much as I can to get rid of that green cast from the leaves we'll go down to our calibration here and it will go a little bit further by taking the green saturation down just seeing where we want the greens to land probably around there grab our blues just see what we're doing pump that back up Reds don't want to take it too far and then if we wanted to go really crazy we could even play with the hue of the blues to give this photo a total fall feel it's not kind of interesting we can totally transform this season with just a few clicks so that's an easy way to add that fall look now if there were people in this photo it might not work so well because the skin tones might be silly but you get what you pay for right and then we could go in here to our split toning if you have no idea how this works you can go ahead and watch my split toning tutorial or you can grab these presets and just apply a split toning look with a click let's say that way way over edited but that's an example of how far you can take this thing from this do this ok one last one for you here's an example that you'll come into all the time if you're taking photos of people whether it's weddings or other if you're on green grass that green grass is reflecting and most of the time you want your skin tones to pop nice well you can grab your calibration we're going to grab our Reds not the hue take the saturation and down saturation the Blues down greens all the way up I don't know why but for some reason this just makes the skin tones pop and everything else darker so you can see how the grass and the green in behind the couple and on the floor here just gets so much darker we instantly make our couple pop off the background that much more now we could add a little bit more saturation back into those Reds took a little too much away and of course this is without any other filters applied normally I would go in here and I would do all of my other things I'd add a preset and fun fact this preset has that kind of effect already built in you can see I've taken the saturation down in the blues up in the greens and down in the red here's before and here's after just watch the background there darken it down so that's a little trick that you can apply to your photos and of course if you ever want that orange and teal look it's as simple as grabbing that blue hue bring it down towards the bottom grab your reds take them towards orange and bam orange and teal look and then just balance it in by grabbing that saturation and making it a little less crazy okay so hopefully this video has been helpful for you in just understanding how powerful this calibration tool is and really what it's meant for which is correcting white balance essentially so if you have different lighting conditions tungsten or daylight or afternoon Sun versus sunset you know how to adjust in the calibration panel to make your colors really work and get rid of those weird our caste that are going on in your images if this tutorial has been helpful do me a huge favor hit that like button make sure to subscribe for new content and tutorials that leave me a comment below I would really love to hear from you and lastly if you want some free presets I will leave some links in case you want to check them out alright I will see you in the next video peace [Music] you

Channel: Signature Edits

Views: 216,756

Keywords: lightroom calibration panel, camera calibration lightroom, lightroom, lightroom tutorial, adobe lightroom, photo editing, get better colors in photos, fix weird colors in lightroom, lightroom color, lightroom classic, lightroom profiles, photography, photography tutorial

Id: Xg7SblduXsI

Length: 23min 13sec (1393 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020