Colour grading in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

2. How to use colour grading: 

In the Colour Grading section, you’ll see various attributes you can edit, including three wheels marked Midtones, Shadows, and Highlights.

Midtones, Shadows and Highlights refer to your image’s Luminance values. Luminance is the light, medium or dark parts of your photo. In essence, each of these wheels affects the colour balance of the relevant luminous sections of your photos.

You will see smaller open grey circles within each Colour Wheel. These circles are positioned in the white centre of each colour wheel before any adjustments are made. You can pull these circles in different directions of the wheel, which will affect the colour balance within that range of luminance values.

For example, pushing the cursor in the Midtone circle towards the blue hues injects more blue into the middle/grey values of the photo. Similarly, pushing the Highlights towards an orange or red tone will add a rose-y tint to the bright values. To refine only the Saturation, drag the circle within the wheel. To refine only the Hue, drag the circle on the edge of the colour wheel. If you want to remove your edits, position the cursor over the name of the colour wheel (the name will have to “Reset xxx”) and click.

To view each of the colour wheels larger and/or to enter numeric values for Hue and Saturation, click the individual circle icons. Additionally, you can select Global editing which will add a colour tint to the entire image, regardless of the luminosity.

As well as the colour wheel, there are three additional sliders.

The Luminance slider controls the brightness of the relevant wheel.

The Blending slider controls the amount of overlap between the tints assigned to the shadows, midtones and highlights. With blending set to 0, there is a small amount of overlap to avoid abrupt transitions, but each colour should remain “pure”. With the slider set to 100%, the colour tints will overlap (crossover) and create additional colours between shadow/midtones and highlights. 

Use the Balance slider to shift the range of values that define the shadows/midtones/highlights. For example, if you apply a blue tint to the shadows and want that tint to extend further into the midtones/highlights, move the Balance slider to the left. If you apply a yellow tint to the highlights and want that tint to extend further into the midtones/shadows, move the Balance slider to the right.

3. Hue, Saturation and Luminance

Above the Colour Grading section is the Colour Mixer section. Within this, rather than editing attributes of the photo by their luminance values (shadows, midtones and highlights), you can edit by individual colour ranges on the spectrum.

For example, you can edit the Hue for the relevant colour - in the below photo, selecting the purple icon and pushing the Hue slider towards the left will shift the purple colours towards blue in the photograph.

You can also alter the Saturation to change the intensity of the specific colour and the Luminance to make the selected colour range lighter or darker.

4. Using colour grading to enhance mood or atmosphere  

Colour grading can completely change the feeling of a photo. For example, in the below image, you can transform a sunrise with rich, warm colours into an icy, arctic scene that feels desolate and cold.

To do that, pull all the red, purple and yellow into colder hues, altering the saturation and luminance to remove colour from the photo or to darken or lighten the specific colour ranges within the photo. In this example, it has the effect of making the sky appear more like a white hazy fog. 

5. Saving colour grading presets to increase efficiency. 

If you want to apply a particular colour gradient to a whole series of photos to create a cohesive look, you can save your edits as a Preset. Firstly, click the Presets icon on the top right corner of the Edit panel.

Click the Plus icon to create your own preset. A dialogue box will popup, where you can edit the name of your preset and which Group it will sit in. Then, check the settings that you want to include in the preset. Press save, then when you navigate to the Yours section of the Preset panel, your new preset will be available for easy application.