Lightroom Color Grading Skills Most Beginners Miss

Hi everyone. Most beginner photographers I speak to don't know how Lightroom color grading works and they're missing out on a powerful editing tool. In this video, I'm going to give you a detailed walkthrough of the color grading panel in Lightroom and how to implement it into a photograph to achieve really good results. I've also got a neat editing trick to show you a bit later that works well with color grading that I use quite often on my images. Firstly, what exactly is color grading? It's a simple process where you apply colors or change colors to an image to create a specific look on your images. I use this quite often to achieve blue in the shadows, for example, or warm in the highlights. You can really tweak and change the colors as you wish to develop your own style. Let's jump into Lightroom and I'll show you how it all works. Firstly, let's run through the color grading panel in Lightroom. I want to explain what all of these sliders do and that's quite important to understand to get the most out of this tool. So I've got a gradient here, simple dark black to pure white and all the tones in the middle. And I'm going to use that to demonstrate how the color grading falls into your image. So let's put some blue onto the shadows. Let's put some pink into the mid-tones and let's put some greens into the highlights, just so you can see and help me differentiate between each of these different ranges where color grading is going to fall. So in the shadows, you can see on the left-hand side, the blue of this color wheel is falling into that area there. The mid-tone color wheel is falling into the middle here and the highlights is falling onto the right-hand side here. On the color grading panel in Lightroom, you've got three different sections where you can add color, the shadows, mid-tones and highlights. And if you click this icon here with all three, it brings up all three color wheels in one window. If you click this one here, it brings up the shadows, the mid-tones or the highlights. And this one just brings up a global color change. So you can implement one global color into your image, for example, but I don't really use that much. I use this triple one here and I like to see all of the color wheels in the same panel. Now under each color wheel here, you've got a slider that is just going to adjust the brightness of the shadow or the highlights. So you can see if I drop down the shadows, it deepens a lot more of the whole shadow area. And if I brighten that up, it makes all of those blacks more into a gray color, allowing the shadows color grade to fall into those areas. So it's basically just brightening those very dark areas. The slider for the mid-tones adjusts the brightness. And then for the highlights, the same thing just on the highlights spectrum. Now it's important to note, if you look at this gradient here on the very left, it's pure black. There's no blue falling into that area. And on the right-hand side here, it's pure white. There's no green from this highlight color wheel falling into that area. So color grading doesn't get applied to the deepest blacks or the brightest whites there. And that's where if you want the color grade to fall into those brightest whites, you just need to darken those whites a little bit. And you can see the color grade going into that area there. And let's brighten up the shadows. You can see the blue is now falling into those shadows there. Now underneath these color wheels, you've got blending and then you've got balance. What blending does, it allows the different areas to bleed into each other. So the blue on a low blending mode won't bleed into the mid-tones. The mid-tones won't bleed into the shadows and in the highlights as well. But if you increase the blending, it allows the mid-tones, shadows, and highlights to bleed into each other a lot more. What balance does, it allows the image to fall more into a shadow or a highlight area. Now that is not adjusting the brightness of your image. It's just allowing, for example, the shadows, a bigger area to fall into. And then going this way, it allows the highlights a bigger area to fall into. So you can really tweak the color in your image quite a lot using that. Under each color wheel here, you've got a little eye icon here to turn off each color if you want to remove it. And then to reset each color wheel, you just double click on the little circle there and that resets that. So to change the color, you just literally just click and drag on the little circle there, click and drag down, you can move it. Once you've got a color that you like, you can adjust the saturation by pushing the circle back towards the center. The more in the center it is, the less saturated it is. And then the more you move that icon towards the outside, the more saturated that becomes. But let's have a look at some examples. So I'll start with this lion image. Before I go into the color grading, I just want to show you this Lightroom tools pack that I've created. It's available for free. Check out the first link in the description to get it. And I've updated it to version 1.3 and I've actually included some new color grading presets which I use quite often. So I'm just going to click this cool warm. Let's have a look at the warm strong. But I think this cool warm is quite nice. So as you can see, I haven't done any edits to this image yet, but just through that color grading, I've given a nice blue tone to the shadows and a slight bump in warmth to the mid-tones and the highlights there. So that's without it and that's with it. Let's just do some basic edits quickly. It's going to add some contrast and just drop those highlights a little bit there. It's going down to color grading again. It might seem a little bit more obvious what the color grading has done there. And you can see I've also dropped down the shadows just to bring in some more contrast into those deep areas there. I really like the warm and cool color balance to this image. This next one, I find with night images, I like to add a very subtle blue tint to the dark areas in this image. And you can do that with color grading. So you can drop down the blue here. And as you can see, it's now affecting a lot of the branch and the leopard skin. And I don't really want that. I only want it to fall into this very dark area here. But now, because this was photographed at night, it's all just black and the blue is not really affecting that part of the image. So what I can do is I can raise this slider just to allow the shadows to fall into those darker areas just by brightening those blacks up very slightly. But now, I still don't want this blue to fall onto the subject and to the branch here. So this is where balance comes in. I want to shift this to the right-hand side because I want the highlights color wheel to dominate the entire image. And because we haven't had a color added in there, let's just, for example, add a green, you can see now this highlights color wheel is affecting most of this image. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop this balance very slightly until I start seeing the blue fall into that very dark area there. So that is a lot better. And then what I can also do is create less blending between the shadows section and the mid-tones and the highlights for that kind of effect. And then what you can do is actually then just add a little bit of warmth back using this highlights or the mid-tones or something like that. I would tweak that a bit further, but you can see that's created some really nice color contrast between the highlight areas in the image and that dark sky there. In this one, let's have a look at the presets and what they do. Color grade cool, cools down the image. So it adds in some nice blue into the shadows, some nice blue into the highlights and mid-tones. But what you could do here, you could actually just shift the highlights into a more warm color there and just play around with different color values to stylize your image. So look at this zebra here, it's a bit dark. So I'm just going to increase the exposure, just change the color profile a bit there just to get rid of a lot more of that contrast. So that's a basic start to the image. Let's go have a look at the color grades here. That cools the image down. Cool warm works quite well. Cool warm strong, that's also looks quite nice. And sepia basically colors the entire image into more of a sepia tone. So let's look at the color grading here. I've warmed the highlights and the mid-tones, the shadows are left alone there. But what you can do now is just click and drag and add some cool shadows to the image, creating some nice contrast there. And the editing trick that I mentioned in the intro is to do with desaturating the image. You can go full desaturation if you want to make the image black and white and add in that color grading to create some color on the image. Just do that quickly for that example, but let's just undo that. So if your image is extremely colorful and you want to add in a very stylistic approach to the shadows and the highlights in terms of color grading, you can desaturate a lot of the colors and allow the color grading to bring in colors into your image. This helps simplify the image a lot more and it works especially well if you have a lot of green in the image. Let's go for a cool and warm tone here. Let's just go very strong just to show you what it's doing. I like what it's doing on the bird. I don't necessarily like what it's doing on the background. So if we just desaturate some of the colors, it just helps the color grading colors to come through a lot better. As you can see, color grading can really create a lot of impact in images, but check out this video next where I use color grading to change certain parts of the image on this full edit in Lightroom.