The Split Toning tab that preceded this had a square setup. The big benefit of using color wheels is that you can easily visualize complimentary colors since they would be on opposite sides of the wheel. The most noticeable part of the Color Grading tab in Lightroom is the color wheels. So unless you are using a gigantic screen, adjust them one at time to give yourself more control. With shadows, midtones, and highlights all on the screen at once, even slight movements will result in big changes. I would recommend working on them individually rather than using the 3-way setup. Midtones are used less often and a global adjustment even less so (unless you want a dramatically stylized image). Most of the time, you should find yourself working on the shadows and highlights. You can choose these right at the top of the tab where it says “Adjust.” Lightroom makes that pretty easy by giving you separate color wheels for shadows, midtones, and highlights (as well as one for overall adjustments to the image). The first step to color grading is deciding which tones of the image you want to target and adjust. Now that you understand the basics behind color grading, lets talk about how you can accomplish this in Lightroom Classic using the new Color Grading tab.

The resulting effect is that the attention of the viewer is drawn to the actor. This helps to create color contrast between the background and the skin tones of the actors. Often color grading is accomplished by adjusting or adding colors to specific areas of an image based on their luminance.įor example, it is very common in Hollywood movies to add a blue or teal color to the darker areas of an image and add orange to the brighter areas. It is used by professional photographers, photo editors, and even video editors on a regular basis to enhance their images and create a specific style or look. What Is Color Grading?Ĭolor grading is a method of adjusting or adding color to specific areas or tones of an image in order to create a specific look or feel in the image.

Adobe Lightroom recently added a very exciting new feature that professional photo and even video editors will find familiar and quite useful…the color grading tab.Īdobe Lightroom’s color grading tab allows you to add specific color tones to the shadows, mid-tones, highlights, and overall image separately and also adjust the saturation and luminance of those color tones as well as how Lightroom balances those colors between the shadows and highlights.īut if you aren’t familiar with this method of color grading, it can seem a little confusing, so I’ll break it all down and show you how to use color grading in Lightroom Classic.

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