PROS Know This About COLOR GRADING, Beginners DON'T

color grading it's not just something you do in the color grading panel in Lightroom in this video I'm going to edit this photo in full and through different color grading techniques achieve this result making the color of the lights much warmer and the photo more dynamic as with all of my edits I come into the profile here and I change it normally to Adobe standard but because this image has a lot of contrast already I'm going to choose a camera matching profile and I'm going to use this flat camera profile here just flattens out the contrast nicely then I'm going to just go down to the detail panel to turn the sharpening off for now and into lens corrections I want to remove chromatic aberration and if you watched my video last week I now use the AI denoise feature in the very beginning of all of my image editing so I'm going to do that the image is not too noisy it was shot at ISO 1000 but it does have a little bit of noise that I want to get rid of so I'm going to use an amount of 50 and I'll click enhance and now that will give me the raw dng file to work on further okay so the dng file is ready the image has been denoised and I want to First work on the exposure and then I'm going to just go into some nice color grading techniques so I want to just increase the exposure slightly on this image open up those Shadows a little bit there and I think I might raise the blacks and then drop the whites a little bit it might be a bit too bright something like that and then drop the highlights and then I think I might just add some clarity to the whole image and I might add a little bit of dehaze just to bring back a little bit of contrast in the image maybe a little bit more contrast here and I might open the Shadows a little bit play with this watch Slaughter here touch as well there's a slightly annoying very bright patch on the bird so I'm just going to throw a quick radial gradient over that just to darken that area very slightly drop the whites down and the highlights just a touch and then while we're here in the masking I'm going to decrease the exposure just on this immediate foreground here it's a very bright patch of water and I just want to darken that a bit just to bring in some more Focus for the bird there you can see it's a nice sort of vignette appearance there I think I might do the same with the top making sure not to go over the subject so what I might do here is I might subtract subject selection from that just to remove that effect from the bird there see just very slightly darken the top and I'll go back into the basic panel and the image is looking a tad dull in terms of the colors so I might increase some of this coloring here a little bit not too much it's looking okay for now and then next go into the tone curve I might just raise the blacks a very small amount I don't like having jet black s in my images like him to be slightly softer so you can see that's a little points on a tone graph there that's the black point so I'm going to just increase that a little bit there so next I'm going to work on some shopping quickly go into the detail panel here zoom into 100 percent and I normally start out with a value of about 70 or so drop the radius down to 0.5 drop the detail down to about 15 and then while holding down alt I click on this masking slider and I'll take away the sharpening from areas that are out of focus so you can see everything that's white is being sharpened and everything that is black is not being sharpened there's no points in sharpening and out of focus area alright so this is where the color grading starts now you might assume that color grading only gets done in this color grading panel but color grading is the process of changing the colors into something different applying different colors into Shadows or highlights so in Lightroom we have this color grading panel but we also have the hsl panel and also the calibration panel for color grading obviously you can use tone curve as well if you click on these small color icons here but today I'm going to show you color grading through the hsl panel also using the color grading panel and then also the calibration panel so I think we'll start with the hsl I want to warm this image up and make it appear like the light was a bit low in the sky with a more warmer characteristic so the green on the background I'm going to change that to be a little bit warmer so with this I'm going to click that small tool there I'm going to click and drag on that background to make those yellows a little bit more orange and these greens towards a little bit more on the orange side as well match there but I think the screen can come down so we'll move into the saturation the blue is getting quite heavily saturated so I'm going to drop that quite a bit I'm going to bring in a little bit of blue again with the color grading so I'm going to drop it maybe a little bit too much because I'll show you a nice trick now and then the green saturation I think I'm going to bring that down a birds and then possibly the yellows maybe as well and then I might increase the saturation on the orange and what I normally do is I don't like the purple color and the magenta color in a lot of my Wildlife so I tend to always desaturate those just a little bit there then the luminance I think it's pretty good as it is I might drop the luminance of the blue slightly to make the blue slightly darker and then maybe increase the luminance on the orange a little bit so there's a before and then isn't after we made it warmer but now with this color grading technique I've basically desaturated the image a little bit to allow for the shadows and the Highlight slider to be applied to those different areas to increase colors in those areas so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add blue into the Shadow and more warmth into the highlights now if the highlights was too saturated already this would just increase the saturation too much and it wouldn't have the desired effect so it's a nice technique to desaturate the image slightly knowing that we're going to add color back through these color grading panels here the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to work on the Shadows and I'm going to throw in some nice blue there and then maybe drop the exposure on that slider somewhat just to add a little bit of contrast into the docks and then this is where the magic happens adding in nice warm highlights here and then also in the midtones so you can see adding that mid-tone slider has a profound effect on the color and then what I normally do is I change this blending and balance sliders just to see what effect it has and I actually quite like what it's doing there balance or it becomes too blue I think that maybe can stay at zero and then now I want to add some vignetting effects to the image not too much but it's just nice to darken down those corners might go back into this basic panel and just increase some of that saturation and then at the end of the panel list is the calibration now the blue primary channel is a nice channel to use to enhance saturation in your images we're going to add in a little bit of saturation there and then I'm going to play with this Hue because I feel like the image is still a bit too green I mean you could change the white balance but I'm going to show you how to use this blue primary just dragging it a little bit to the left has changed the colors nicely the blue has changed and the warm light has changed a little bit there it's very subtle and it's had a nice effect I'm just going to go back to the basic panel I might add a little bit more contrast a little bit more Shadows I feel like the top of the image is I like the darkness but I don't like the color so I'm going to go back to this gradient we made I'm just going to warm that up so that creates the effects of that light further into the top of the image there now what I want to do is I want to add a light bleed effect on the very left of the image so I'm going to zoom out to 12 percent create a radial gradient quite a big one drag it over the image like that and now what you want to do is just subtract the subject to take away the effect from that subject and I'm going to Black slider exposure and maybe a little bit of warmth and a little bit of dehaze just to add in a slight diffusion onto that light there that's a before and after just adding a nice effect there I think I might crop this image maybe a nice 16x9 crop will work what I want to do now is I want to increase the saturation on this water drop and I want to make the eye a little bit brighter it's a very dark eye there but I just want to brighten the top section so I'm going to use a brush make it a lot smaller just paints over that bright section of the eye there increase that exposure and I'm going to make a new brush paint over the water droplets and what I'm going to do here is I'm going to increase the whites to increase the brightness and then just throw in some saturation as well I think now I just want to increase the clarity a little bit more to increase a bit of that contrast but I don't want to add Clarity to the entire image I want to add it to the in Focus areas so a nice little trick you can do here is use your select subject once it creates a subject selection then what I'm going to do next is also select the water that is in Focus so I'm going to add a brush a relatively small brush and then I'm just going to paint on that in Focus area if I add a bit more time I'd be a bit more careful with that selection but I'm just going to increase the clarity slider and then possibly just increase more of this Vibrance and maybe add in a very slight magenta tweak I think just before we end this video I'm just going to change some of this blue color I feel like the blue is a little bit too dark let's increase the Vibrance and adjust the Hue of the blue I think it's leaning a little bit more towards the purple side this is the raw file before and this is the final result I shared another great way of thinking about color grading in this video here I highly recommend checking it out next

Channel: Mark Dumbleton

Views: 105,271

Keywords: color grading, color grading lightroom, color grading tutorial, lightroom color grading, lightroom tutorial, wildlife photography, wildlife photography in lightroom, colour grading, colour grading tutorial, pro lightroom workflow, color grading wildlife, lightroom color grade tutorial, how to color grade in lightroom, wildlife photography tips, wildlife photography editing, lightroom color grading cinematic, lightroom color grading for beginners, lightroom color grading photo

Id: vaWEI31QZDQ

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023