STEP BY STEP

Take control of colour in Lightroom

Balance your whites

On the whole, auto settings are a good go-to for most of us to start with, and in some cases Lightroom intelligently picks the right colour correction. But here, it draws all the colour out of the flower and insect, so we want to stick with As Shot.

Increase Vibrance

Vibrance works by boosting or reducing the middle tones of colour; you’ll see this in the more subtle colours in an image, like the wider parts of the petals here. This is particularly useful where, as in our shot, a lot of the frame is filled with more subdued tones that need boosting.

Boost Saturation

Saturation increases the colour of every pixel, across the board. Everything from bright highlights down to dark shadows will be altered, which also means it’s possible to clip colours. Be careful not to overdo it when pulling the Saturation slider to the right.

The Color Mixer

This colour adjustment allows you to alter the intensity of individual colour channels. So if you have a blue sky, or a purple flower that you need slightly more colourful you can adjust saturation of the appropriate colour channel to suit.

Hue and Luminance

With the Color Mixer, you can also change a channel’s hue. We’ve dragged the Orange channel’s Hue slider to the left, which makes the insect redder. Luminance changes the brightness of the colour; here we’ve increased Orange Luminance to make the insect brighter.

Black and White

In Black and White mode, you can see a mixer for all colour channels. Drag a slider to the left and you darken that colour; drag it to the right to brighten it. To make the insect stand out, we boosted Orange and Yellow; we reduced Purple and Magenta to darken the flower.