Fundamentals: Colour-grading

Take a leaf out of cinema production to fine-tune your colours in Lightroom

Lightroom Classic has progressively become a one-stop shop for your image needs. It was always designed with batch-processing in mind, but recently it’s begun to excel in this area, especially at image finishing. The basic Split Toning Panel has been succeeded by the Color Grading Panel, with more control over the colour in your shadows, midtones and highlights, as well as region brightness.

Finishing your image is a key part of taking your photo from capture to final output. Here, you’re going to get a look at applying what’s called analogous colour. In simple terms, this is a palette that uses similar hues – here, we’re using warm and earthy shades to suit the styling and the location of our photo.

To make the process even faster, I’ve made you a preset that applies these changes: it’s compatible with Lightroom Classic CC 2021 and Camera Raw 13. Look for it in the Gifts folder in this issue’s download.

1 Adjust the shadows

Open the Color Grading Panel. There are five options: the first showing colour wheels for Shadows, Midtones and Highlights; then three detail views, and finally a Global view for overall image control. Go to the detail view for Shadows. Drag the control to get Hue to 6 and Saturation to 18.

2 Restrict the tones

You can open the triangle on the right to reveal Hue and Saturation sliders to work less visually. Increase Luminance to +48. This has the effect of raising the black point so there is no longer any true black. Often this is done in Tone Curve, but can now be achieved in Color Grading.

3 Adjust the highlights

Move onto the Highlights wheel. Set Hue to 54 and Saturation to 27 for a warm shade. To make the image a little crisper, increase Luminance to +37, which effectively moves the white point.

4 Finishing touch

Because you’re not using Midtones on this look, increase Blending to 76 to bring the overlap together. To match the previous Split Toning Panel, you can set this to 100 if desired, but 76 is enough for this photo.