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Color Grading

Lesson 7 from: Photo Editing in Lightroom Classic for The Photo Enthusiast

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

7. Color Grading

Learn how to make unique color adjustments to your images in the new Lightroom Classic Color Grading tool. Make adjustments to your highlights, midtones and shadows separately with the easy to use color wheels.
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Lesson Info

Color Grading

So inside of the color grading area, there are three controls and you can control them differently. So right here, in this mode, we're looking at all three controls at the same time, I can also look at just the shadows? Just the mid tones, Just the highlights or I can do global adjustments, but let's talk about all three controls at the same time. So if I want to control the shadows and warm them up or cool them down, I simply grab this thing in the center and drag the color wherever I wanted to go. So see how I'm dragging down and adding blue into the shadows, which is kind of nice. And then I go to the mid tones and the mid tones, I don't necessarily want to change. So I'm gonna leave those there, but I can also change the brightness of the mid tones or the darkness of the mid tones. So I'm kind of playing around with those and I actually just by mistake, it looks like I kind of like the softness of the mid tones when I darken them a little bit. So let's just change that to a little ...

bit darker in the mid tones and then the highlights were going to take those and warm them up a little bit and see what I can do. I can try and find it's, It's always easier to see what your effect is if you take it way beyond what you're planning on doing. So I'm taking it to 100% and then I'm just kind of scrolling back and forth on the warmth there to find the right kind of warmth that looks about right and then if I hold the shift key down, do you see how a line gets created right there? If I hold the shift key down then it can't shift off of that line. Now I can play with the Total saturation of that colour, so that's zero, so no effect in the highlights. And as I go up, I'm starting to affect the highlights and I only want to be very subtle about it. So we're just going to go to there, we're at 38 saturation, so that's how we change the shadows, the mid tones and highlights with the color grading area and then we can see what they look like without our effect by clicking on this little eyeball, so I'm gonna click on the eyeball and the mid tones, you can see that the mid tones brighten up a little bit, you can see what it looks like without my highlight effect and without my shadow effect. So that looks pretty dang cool. Then we have blending and balance and that helps us to further fine tune the adjustment that we've just made. So if I want to change how much the shadows blend into the highlights or vice versa, the highlights blend into the shadows, I can do that by using the blending tool. If I go to the left, do you see how things are blending that way and if I go to the right, it's getting more blue. So as I go to the left, it gets warmer in the shadows and as I go to the right, it gets cooler in the shadows so I can blend back and forth until I like the way it blends. Then once I got that I can go to balance and balance is going to say, which way do we want to go the whole thing? Are we are we only going for the cool and the shadows? Or are we only going for the warm And so it helps us to balance between the two. It's almost like there's just a pendulum that swings one way or the other. And so I kind of like, and I'm just just eyeball it. There's no science to this whatsoever. It's just eyeball, find out what you like. There we go. I like the effect. This looks really cool. And so now I've got this cool color grading effect and I'm going to go back over to my presets area and I'm going to click on, create another preset and I'm going to create a preset of color grading. No tone curve, Just the color grading and we're going to call this color grade blue shadow warm highlights and hit create. There we go. So now we have two independent presets that we can use on top of each other or independent of each other. So for instance, if I don't want the tone curve, look what it looks like without the tone curve still an interesting effect, and if I turn on the tone curve, that's what it looks like. So now we have, we actually have three different presets because we built one for tone, one for the color grading, and then the two together make a completely different one. So now I can make three different effects from two different presets.

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Ratings and Reviews

Byron Sieber
 

Jared does an excellent job at taking a subject and breaking it down step by step. He includes great explanations along the way to help you understand why he is doing something. His results, which are great photos, speak for themselves.

user-814d7a
 

Excellent class with great detail on the new Masking tools! Thanks, Jared!

Michael Grosso
 

Excellent overview of the features included in the most recent upgrade of Adobe Lightroom. Very practical applications are covered at a very good pace. Thank you!

Student Work

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