Here, we’ve added a Colour Balance layer to skew the colours slightly, and a Curves layer to flatten out the contrast. The great thing about using Adjustment Layers for your colour grading is how you can build up the effect on several layers and combine a range of adjustments. You can then lower the layer opacity or use a blend mode (Overlay here) to make the colour shifts more subtle. It allows you to map colours onto the tonal range of your photos. Start with the Gradient Map Adjustment Layer. If the Color Lookup presets don’t work for you, try making your own colour changes. The film presets like the Kodak LUT here can add a nice retro treatment. Click through the various presets in the 3DLUT dropdown to try out different effects. Open an image into Photoshop then click the Adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Color Lookup. Some are paid for via monthly subscription, so watch the cost. Lots of third-party LUTs are available too, many of which emulate the look of blockbuster movies. The best way to do so is to include the LUT in a custom profile for Lightroom. Any combination of Adjustment Layers and blending modes can be exported as a LUT, so you can save your favourite colour grading treatments for quick use on other photos. More interestingly, Photoshop gives you the option to create and export your own LUTs. In Photoshop there’s the dedicated Colour Lookup Adjustment Layer. There are a number of ways of applying LUTs to your photos.
#Neutral colors photography how to#
Learn how to use and create colour LUTs (lookup tables) for your favourite colour grades You can get some unusual colour shifts by making several points along the curve line by, for example, adding a red tint to highlights and a cyan tint to shadows. The red channel lets you add red or cyan, the green channel introduces green or magenta, and the blue channel offers blue or yellow. The colours in the graph give you an idea of the shifts you can make. Target a colour channel, then experiment by dragging the top or bottom points up, down, left or right to tint the shadows or highlights. The easiest way to get started is with the Curve panel in Lightroom/Camera Raw. Not only can you change the brightness of different parts of the tonal range by dragging the curve line up or down (the left side affects shadows, the right highlights), you can also target and alter colour channels (red, green and blue for an RGB image). To do so, open the image in Camera Raw, go to the Presets panel, hold Alt and click the New Preset icon to create a new custom profile.Ĭurves is a fabulous tool for colour grading. You can also save your own colour effects as profiles. You might find the perfect Profile for your image straight off the bat, but even if not, they can still be useful for kick-starting your colour grading. Once chosen, the Amount slider lets you control the strength of the effect.
Hover over the thumbnails to see how they affect your image. Profiles are organised into different sets like Modern and Vintage. By mapping colours onto the highlights, midtones or shadows, we can take our images in all kinds of interesting directions.įound in the Lightroom Basic Panel, the Profile browser offers a range of one-click treatments, many of which are fantastic for colour grading. It’s a great mood enhancer, whether we want to give our photos a warm, sunny vibe, a cold sombre feeling, or a retro makeover. This is where colour grading can be so effective. Then comes the creative stage, where we create an atmosphere. First is the correction stage, where we fix white balance, fine-tune exposure, crop and make other tweaks. Photo editing can be divided into two broad stages. But what exactly is colour grading? And what tools and apps do we need to carry it out? Below we’ll explore some of the key techniques for colour grading in Lightroom and Photoshop and show you how to create classic colour grading looks. James Paterson gets you up to speedĬolour grading is something we associate with video editing, but as the boundaries between video and stills – as well as photographers and videographers – become increasingly blurred, it’s a technique that is ever more relevant to photographers. Colour grading is a hot topic in photo editing, and a great way to enhance the mood of your images.
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