Mystery Solved! The Lightroom Color Tool

in this video we're gonna take this photo and we're gonna turn it into this photo and we're gonna use some very cool little color tricks inside of Lightroom and Camera Raw to do it in fact some some kind of you know I want to stay hidden they're just it's just a color tool that a lot of people don't see because it's kind of tough to all the way down there at the bottom well folks my name is Matt klutz Kowski and I want to welcome you to this tutorial we're gonna dive right in here so this is a color setting that it can be used for a lot of things and when we think of changing color especially in Lightroom or Camera Raw with our raw editor we think we have you know temperature and tint and our white balance and we have hue and saturation where we can we can manipulate colors but if you look over here I'm inside of Lightroom if I go to the graduated filter or the radial filter or the adjustment brush you're gonna see a little color setting down here that kind of it kind of just it stays under the radar because number one it's just got a plain little square with an X over it that really nobody ever thinks to click on and I also I think I think there's some confusion about maybe when you would use this tool you know like what's the difference why would I use this over maybe temperature or hue and saturation so we're gonna take a look at exactly that we're gonna start off with a really techie example here we will start to build where we can manipulate manipulate the color a little bit or we can actually change the color of something in a way that we really can't do it in any way else inside of Lightroom or Camera Raw okay alright let's start off with this example here what I'm gonna do is is I'm gonna I'm gonna close that up I'm gonna go to the temperature slider I know what I want to warm something I'll usually just take the temperature and and start to move it over here to the right you can see when I go to the right it's it's warm when I go to the left its it's blue or colder same thing with tint you know red or green we don't typically use tint creatively as much as we do temperature and tint doesn't mean you can't and I do sometimes but mostly I want to I want to take something and make it especially landscape photos or certain portraits so grab that slider move it over here to the right-hand side now let's go over I made a I made a virtual copy just right click and choose create virtual copy here I made a virtual copy we're gonna do it a different way alright we're gonna go and grab the gradient filter here the graduated filter and and rather than do temperature I'm gonna go down here over color I'm gonna click on that color swatch and I can choose whatever color I want gonna use one of the defaults here which is the kind of that super warm orange a yellow color and you can choose you can choose the color and then you can choose the saturation which basically just moves it up and down which controls the overall saturation of that color and then what we're gonna do is I want to apply this to the whole photo if I just click and drag it's gonna obviously graduate across the whole photo it's not what I want I'm gonna click off the canvas and drag away and you'll see that's a way to apply the graduated filter to the entire image okay it doesn't just apply across the image applies it to the entire image so it's not going to fade away at any point there all right so let's take a look at what just happened here okay and this this is this is where we can get kind of interesting and by the way when we're in the graduated filter here if you're inside of Photoshop scammer raw and you go to any one of those tools that we had inside a Lightroom you can see down there then you have that color swatch down there as well so it works inside of Camera Raw as well so take a look and the most important part of this is the histogram that's why I picked a techy example first I kind of want to test the boundaries of this so if you look at the histogram you can see it's just a great white gradient but now that we've introduced color you start to see some spikes of color as I click and turn this histogram on and off the the tones of the histogram for the most parts stay the same right and it really make anything brighter or darker I just introduced a yellow warming tone to the entire photo well let's go ahead and and let's go back to our other example here and let's turn that one off I'm gonna go back to the first example there we go and now in the basic panel if you remember we took the temperature slider we cranked it up well let's reset it just double click temperature so look at the shape of the histogram and watch everything shift over to the right as I do this and you can visibly see it in the photo if you look at the grays which would be the shadows and a photo if you look if you watch that you could see it kind of goes away right those grades start to fade away so we are warming the photo we're obviously you know changing the color temperature of the photo in doing that we're actually also brightening the photo you're actually you're changing the histogram the photo will look brighter now what I don't really want to say what's right or wrong or better or worse in this case in fact I used them both for different things okay and that's what I hope to get across in this video here there are times where I want a bright warm feeling and and I'll add some temperature to that I'll do exactly what I did here to get that type of a feeling there's other times where I really just want to manipulate the color I don't want it to mess with the brightness or the darkness of everything okay so that is our that's our techie example let's go take a look at real world we will we'll take this photo here and I will go this is uh this is a little mountain range in Glacier National Park crank up the temperature you can visibly see I mean it makes the photo brighter the sky though the clouds look brighter you know everything looks brighter in the photo I'll go to the next one again I'd submit a virtual copy I'll go to the graduated filter keep the same settings I had before just click off the screen and just drag and you can see here it doesn't make anything brighter darker it just introduces a color to the photo okay alright so so where I and I wouldn't use it on this photo like this but where would I use it well let's go ahead and close this up I would use it I use it a lot of times on my landscape photos in the sky all right I use it I use it in places where a color is acting stubbornly I think that's the best way to say because I can go down to hue and saturation and if I wanted to change the color of something I could shift the color but it's not really ever going to add color to something right it's just gonna shift the color and then even at that I can't really change the color because if I wanted to make something that was blue look red I can't I can make something that's blue look a different shade of blue right because that's all I have control with you it's just gonna keep me in that blue family there so I can't really change the color of anything but I use it a lot in my skies so rather than go and take the basic panel let's let's do some some technical editing here and crank up my shadows a little bit boost my whites a bit here maybe even add a little bit of saturation and I would overall I think I would warm the photo right so that's one way to take it but the other thing that I noticed and this happens a lot in my my skies is I have a lot of gray still alright and this son this sunrise it just it didn't cooperate it looked like it's a pretty sunrise don't get me wrong but I thought the whole sky was gonna light up and the the Sun must have gone behind a cloud right at sunrise or something because it kind of just held back from from part of the sky and it just kept everything a big part of the sky still stayed gray throughout the sunrise there okay ooh real quick guys I'm gonna asking a big favor and that is if you were wherever you're watching this if you would go ahead and like or subscribe I would greatly appreciate it if you're on youtube just hit the subscribe button you'll get notifications when I do new videos if you're on Facebook just hit the like button on my facebook page and of course you'll get notifications for that stuff as well okay okay back over here to our tutorial so the the way that I would really take this let's pull back on our temperature here alright and and this is this is gonna be a heavy edit and I'm okay with it it's my photo but sometimes I like really supersaturated photos if you don't you should stop watching now so instead of adding some warmth to the sky I'm gonna go down here to my color and I'm gonna push this over toward the reddish-orange area here and I'm gonna click and drag down and you can see it totally changes that sky alright now if I were to compare this and get rid of that and just add some warmth to it the warmth it accentuates the warmer colors but it tends to kind of leave the gray alone it doesn't really infuse any color into that gray and that's why I usually stay away from it for there so if I really want to kind of infuse color into something that's when I'll jump over here and I'll go into these color pickers and again I'll use kind of an orangey reddish type of a color in this example it's pretty heavy-handed I'm ok with that I kind of like it I might I might back off a little bit on the saturation here maybe down to there what I would do from here is I think I'd go down here I'd still add some warmth to it and that'll just kind of give the overall kind of balanced warmth I could always go back to my graduated filter and I could drag one up from the bottom and that's way too much for the bottom but there's nothing saying I can't go down here to my color picker and really pull back really reel that in so you know I'm kind of tackling my sky and then my foreground separately but I'm using that whole same color family to do it all right so that's a that's an example how I would take this one if I were to finish it up I'd probably go over here to my vignette already did apparently add a little bit of a vignette in there and you got your before and your after I'm not saying I actually like the blue version better it's got a very cool feeling to it so I enjoyed kind of just playing around with this one I took it in a couple of different directions all right let's look at our last photo here so I had mentioned changing the color and this tool can be really useful to do that so instead of using the grad filter I would go and use the adjustment brush and by the way this is this photos from Colin Hagen I do these a series called photo makeovers and I do some webinars and I ask people to submit photos so this was one great photo that Colin submitted I thought you know I like the fall colors obviously I mean some beautiful Reds in there I thought if I could take that dormant look away from the grass could be pretty cool so we grab the brush and we go down here to the color swatch I'm not gonna use orange I'm gonna use a greenish color and I'm gonna tell you right off of the bat it's gonna look bad I'm selling this one really well aren't I it's gonna look bad at first but we're gonna go through here we'll paint yeah we'll go over here and paint we're gonna fix this but this will least get us started so now we're kind of adding that green tint to the photo now we can't really get there with just the color tint all right I can go got a brighter green which just looks radioactive or I can go a little saturated what still takes it more toward yellow so I would leave it about where we had it what will help bring this one home is a little bit of exposure so reduce that exposure a little bit like so it could always maybe even desaturate it a little bit here but as you start to manipulate the exposure now you can really get in there and you can dial that in to get a more realistic color I don't know whether I want it bright green and you know spring-summer type of a tone to it but something a little bit more just a little bit more life to it than the previous one had so we can go in there and change the color that way and I mean if even if I paint on the mountains it adds a nice color again this is a fall photo so I don't necessarily know I need to do it on this photo but for those photos where you know the colors are kind of lagging a little bit this is a really good way to go in there you don't want saturation right you don't want you don't just want to saturate everything and it's it's not like you just want to go in there and change the temperature because we saw where that one can fall apart a little bit so we knew you really need a lot of control over your colors and that little color swatch is a great place to go check it out okay one last thing one last thing is that as a tip for you and that is sometimes you're gonna want to get rid of it so the way to get rid of it you don't have to click on it and then go and reset the way to get rid of it is just go over here and double click the word color and that'll that'll just zero it out basically goes to that little X and that little swatch that it was in there before it's the same on every slider if you double-click a slider inside of Lightroom it resets it back to its default value folks thanks so much for watching hope you enjoyed this one and I will talk to you again real soon

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 108,709

Keywords: Lightroom, Lightroom Tips, Color Change, Color Tool, mattk, matt kloskowski

Id: AGdUGcAq5cc

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2018