Transcription
Hey photographers, my name is Denver Riddle. I'm a film colorist, and if you're wondering how can I make the look of my images stand out through color grading in Lightroom Classic and make them look cinematic, well, I'm going to reveal that here in this beginner crash course.
Using the grading tools adopted into Lightroom from the film world, I'm going to be sharing with you the same grading secrets I revealed in a blockbuster tutorial for Adobe Premiere that's helped millions of filmmakers. Those secrets now for Lightroom.
All my life, I've spoken your words have been so broken. I've been under your hypnosis. Cell phone became your brother, internet replaced your mother.
We're going to create these amazing looks. You'll be able to download these as presets and easily apply these to your own images. Also, while YouTube is a great resource for learning about all different kinds of subjects, if you're looking for a shortcut to getting this cinematic look in Lightroom, I want to let you know about a plug-in we've developed for Lightroom that allows you to do point-and-click color grading right within the viewer. It has scopes beyond the histogram scope and enables you to apply LUTs or lookup tables without any kind of workarounds. To learn more, just click the link below to check out Photograde.
All right, let's do this thing. Ha!
Inside Lightroom, you can see I've already imported a bunch of photos into the library. Let's pick the first one we want to color grade and hit Develop to go to the Develop module. On the right-hand side, we have the histogram scope, and below the Edit, Crop, Heal, Red Eye, and Masking panels. Because this tutorial is about color grading, we'll leave it parked at the Edit panel, which contains all the color correction and grading tools.
Before we jump in and start grading this thing, let's discuss basic terminology for how we define color. The three basic terms that we use to define color are Hue, Saturation, and Luma. Hue is the name we call colors. Saturation is the intensity or vividness of a hue. And Luma is the brightness or shade of hue.
It's also important to know how to read the scopes, which can be super beneficial. In the case of Lightroom and other photo editing programs, there's only the histogram scope. However, the histogram scope is still useful for analyzing the Luma and chroma intensity of an image and provides a visual representation helpful in balancing shots in the shadows, midtones, and highlights. The histogram is read from left to right, with the shadows at the left and the highlights on the right. The Luma values of the red, green, and blue channels are read as though the pixels are stacked on top of each other from the bottom to the top, with the least amount of Luma represented in the trace on the left and the greatest amount of Luma on the right.
There are other helpful scopes like the waveform, the RGB parade, and the vector scope that are used every day by professional colorists in the video and film industry. These are game-changers for evaluating the exposure, saturation, color balance, and skin tones in a more detailed way. Though you don't find these in Lightroom, they are, however, available through Photograde, the plug-in that I mentioned earlier.
Now, before diving into each of these tools, let's talk about workflow. The color grading process is divided into two stages: color correction or base color correction, and color grading or creative look. In the color correction stage, we're just looking for any image issues and then correcting them so that it looks natural, the same way our eyes perceived it when the image was captured. As part of color correction, we first correct the exposure or brightness of the image, second, the white balance or color temperature if there are any issues, and lastly, the saturation by either increasing or reducing it.
Then comes the second stage, the color grading, where we intentionally give the image a particular style, mood, or vibe. This is the creative, fun part where we can push in or out colors, play around with contrast and saturation in a stylized way that creates a unique look that sets you apart. This will make more sense as we get into it.
Let's start first with color correction. Inside the Basic tab, which is divided into three sections: White Balance, Tone, and Presence. Again, the first step for color correction is exposure or brightness, which means we'll start in the Tone section. It has six sliders. The Black control adjusts the darkest parts of the image or the pixels at the far left of the histogram. The Whites control adjusts the brightest parts or the pixels at the far right of the histogram. The Shadows control affects the tonal range between the shadows and the midtones, and you would use it to either darken or recover detail in the shadow areas. The Highlights control affects the tonal range between the midtones and the highlights or the upper part of the tonal range for either brightening or recovering detail in the highlight areas. Exposure controls the general exposure of the image, and Contrast the general contrast.
Looking at the histogram, we see that most pixels are sitting toward the left side since all of this section of the photo is a bit dark, while the rest of the pixels sit far to the right, representing this area of the image that is almost blown out. So, let's recover detail in the brightest areas. For that, I'll bring the Whites slider all the way down. There are certain areas where there's no more detail to recover, but it still makes a huge difference gaining much more detail here. Next, I'll bring the Blacks up just a bit to make sure we get as much detail as possible in the deepest blacks. Next, to get a bit more brightness in the shadows, we'll use the Shadow slider, and then bring the Highlights down just a bit with the Highlight slider. There's no need to make any further exposure or contrast changes, so we'll leave those sliders alone. Later on, I do intend to add more contrast to the image as part of the final look, but for right now, I'm happy with how natural or realistic this looks. This is the first step.
Next, we'll fix the color temperature. Since the image is looking cool and has a heavy magenta tint, we can fix it manually with the Temperature and Tint sliders or do it automatically using the Color Picker to click over a gray neutral area. I think this area of the sidewalk will work. That did a great job. Now, if for whatever reason we're not happy with the result, we can still manually adjust those sliders to our liking. In this case, I think we can cool down the image a little bit and dial back the green tint, and that's the second step of color correction.
Let's take a look at the before and after of what we've done so far using this eye icon at the top left of the tab. That's a huge difference.
Now, let's get into what Lightroom calls Presence. There are five sliders here. Texture is used to enhance detail, so it can be used to either reduce the detail in skin tones or to bring up the detail in leaves or wood. In this case, we don't need that much, but if I bring it down slightly, it softens our subject's skin. Then comes Clarity, which affects the contrast in the midtones, so if I increase it just a bit, it makes the subject's face pop, making it look more three-dimensional. Dehaze, I won't touch, but it's for removing atmospheric haze through contrast. Haze can be caused by sunlight hitting the lens, smoke, or simply the air when looking at a distant mountain. Then comes the third step of color correction, or Saturation. The Vibrance and Saturation sliders are related. Saturation brings up all the colors in the image, and as you can see here, it really messed up the skin tones. On the other hand, Vibrance affects the saturation while protecting the skin tones, so it has more of a mild effect. I'll bring it up a bit just to make the colors feel a bit more alive, and that is our base color correction.
Let's look again at the before and after. You can see this makes it look natural without adding any kind of stylized look. We went from having exposure and white balance issues to a photo that you could share or print, but this isn't going to set you apart, and it doesn't look cinematic.
So now it's time for the fun part where we can start building a look, a specific style, or color grade. For that, we'll bring in the Tone Curve tab. Here's a quick crash course on how curves work. The bottom point adjusts the shadows, the top point adjusts the highlights, and we can create as many points in between as we want to shape the tonal range. In this case, we don't want to affect the deepest shadows and brightest highlights too much, so we'll create contrast in the in-between areas known as undertones, overtones, and midtones. I'll make a point here in the midtones and drag it up. This improves our exposure but makes the undertones look a little washed out. So, let's create a point here and drag it down to adjust the density of the undertones or shadows. I'll then create a point here and drag it up, giving it a bit more brightness to the highlights. This is known as an S-curve, and it's the base for the cinematic look, giving it natural, punchy-looking contrast without making the shadows too dark and the highlights too bright.
Another common characteristic of this cinematic look is a gentle rolloff in the highlights. Film doesn't have extreme highlights; instead, there's an organic rolloff where they often appear muted and retain texture and tonality. To accomplish this, we'll bring the top point down, creating a nice gentle curve like a shoulder, creating that gentle rolloff. The same goes for the shadows on film. Often, the deepest shadows look slightly elevated but never pitch black. Colorists refer to this as milky blacks, and it gives it a vintage characteristic. To accomplish this, we'll bring the bottom point up, creating a knee.
So far, we've used only the Luma curve, which affects only luminance or the brightness and darkness of our image. But we have three other curves here for the red, green, and blue channels. We can use these three curves to create a similar S-curve to make colors a bit more punchy, or we can use them to introduce specific colors to the tonal range. For example, going into the Blue curve, we can create a point for the overtones and drag it down to make the highlights look warmer. Then we can go to the Red curve and pull down on the undertones to introduce teal. Finally, we can go to the Green curve, create points for the overtones, midtones, and undertones, and drag the midtones and undertones up a bit to introduce some green. The added green is a common characteristic of some film stocks. In this particular case, I want to explore other tools to introduce specific colors to create the look, so I'll delete the points created in the red, green, and blue curves and move on to the next tab, HSL.
Here, we can control the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance of specific color ranges. For example, let's say we want the leaves to be darker. We'll go into the Luminance and bring the values for green down. The skin tones are looking a little reddish, so we'll move into Hue, and because skin tones sit usually on the orange range, I'll move the orange slider towards yellow, effectively removing some of that red from the face. There's still some red in the neck area, so we'll use the red slider to move the Hue towards orange. And I don't like that the leaves look yellowish, so I'll move the yellow slider towards green. Jumping back to the Saturation section, I see a lot of purple and magenta in this area of the sidewalk, so I'll bring the saturation sliders down for those colors. I also don't like the blue tint on his T-shirt and the wall, so I'll bring the saturation for the blue down too. In doing this, we're starting to create a color palette for the image. Most of it is made up of green and yellow, mainly the green leaves are the subject and a bit of the background, while everything else like the sky, wall, and sidewalk look neutral.
Let's look at the before and after of this grade. The subject now stands out more, giving us a nice contrast between him and the darker leaves. We're going to keep pushing towards this look using the next tab, which Lightroom calls Color Grading.
This tab is made of three color wheels for Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights, and a fourth wheel called Global, which affects the whole image. These tools are modeled after the traditional T-slits controls found in color correctors for video, and we can use these either for color corrections or for a stylized grade. Up until this point, we've been modifying the existing colors of the image, but now we can use the wheels to push colors into the three tone ranges of Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. Using the pucks in the middle of each wheel, we can also modify the luminance for each of the tone ranges with the sliders below each wheel. Because I want to keep pushing this towards a warm look, I'll use the Highlights wheel to add more yellow and then push some blue into the Shadows to compensate and to create some color separation. I want the skin tones to keep that warm vibe, so I'll push some yellow into the Midtones.
Below the wheels, you'll find two sliders: Blending, which modifies the amount the three tone ranges blend, effectively making each range wider. So, if I bring the Blending value down, you'll notice that the yellow highlights affect less of the areas closer to the midtones, and if I bring the value up, yellow starts to invade the midtones and even the shadows. In this case, I'll just leave it at its default value of 50. Balance is pretty much the same but in a more aggressive way. Pushing to the right, the color values from the highlights start invading the whole image. Pushing to the left, the color values from the shadows start tinting everything. Again, I'll leave it at its default value of zero.
Then we have a tab called Detail for sharpening and Transform for cropping, scale, and rotation. We won't go into that as it's not part of color grading. Then Lens Corrections for fixing chromatic aberration and distortion some lenses may introduce. Effects is for adding vignetting and grain, and these we will use in the look we're going for. We can control the amount of vignetting, midpoint, roundness, feather, and we can even make sure the vignette doesn't affect the highlights as much. I won't go deep into each slider, just remember vignetting helps focus the attention of the viewer towards a model or an object in the frame. Looking at the before and after, you can clearly see how the vignette pushes our eyes towards the subject.
And finally, Grain. If you're trying to mimic the texture of film, this is where you do it, so I'll add just a bit.
Finally, we have the Calibration tab, which lets us change the mixture of red, green, and blue within each pixel. It's basically a way to balance the Hue and Saturation of the image using the three primary colors, and it can be used to make final tweaks to the color balance after doing all the specific corrections we have made. I'll use it to push the look a little further, changing the red Hue more towards yellow and bringing its saturation down so it doesn't look too overpowering. To regain some color contrast, I'll push greens more towards teal and blue, and blue towards teal.
Now, let's see a side-by-side view of the original image and the final result by clicking on this icon at the bottom left of the image. That's a major difference, but we're not done yet.
The panel has other sections. Here we have a whole other section for cropping, one for the healing brush to delete blemishes and other imperfections, a red-eye section, and finally, the one I'm most interested in, the masking section. And the reason this is so important is colors will use shape masks to do relighting, draw attention to subjects, or limit different effects. What's neat about Lightroom is you can automatically mask a subject, the sky, or background. So, let's pick the subject, and then you can perform any kind of correction affecting only the masked subject using the same tools we've been using. You can tell it to isolate a specific object, just click Object, select a brush size, and paint over the object, and Adobe AI will identify and create a mask automatically for you. You can create masks with linear or radial gradients or by selecting a specific range of colors or luminance. But my favorite one is the brush tool. With it, I can paint on any part of the image and turn it into a mask. For this photo, I'd like to get a bit more detail in the darkest area of the subject's hair, so with the brush tool, I'll paint over that area and then bring up the Shadows a bit. And here's the before and after. This lets you be very granular in the corrections you want to make and allows you to tweak it to perfection.
Now, I want to show you two more images that I already corrected and graded, just so you can see this same procedure applied to different images. This one is interesting because I made no corrections to it in the Color Grading tab. Instead, to introduce specific colors, I used the Tone Curves for turning the sky into this mix of yellow and teal. In the Blue curve, I brought the overtones down, while in the Red and the Green curve, I brought them up. For the cool shadows, I brought the undertones of the Red and Green curves down, giving it a stylized cross-process effect. And moving to the Mask section, you can see I used a mask to desaturate the sky, another one to bring the highlights down a bit just for the subject, and a third mask to brighten up the reflections in his sunglasses.
In this next photo, I'll jump directly to the Mask section so you can see how I mask the eyes to make them pop, a mask on the shiny areas of the skin tones to tone them down, and a mask for the reddishness on her nose to correct its Hue and Saturation.
Finally, if you want to copy this correction between photos, you can right-click on a photo, go to Develop Settings, Copy Settings, check the settings you want to copy, move to another photo, again right-click, Develop Settings, and click Paste Settings. Or you can go to the Presets tab on the left side, click the plus icon, and create a preset based on your current corrections.
Presets and LUTs are great shortcuts for color grading your photos, but the only way to see what every preset does is to go one by one through them to see a preview. And if you want to apply a LUT, Lightroom doesn't support them natively, so there's a long workaround you have to do in order to import them as a preset. With Photograde, you're able to see real-time previews of LUTs, and it comes with 90 built-in Hollywood colors, presets, and film stocks that you can see at once. Besides the scopes, it also has a false color feature where you can see the exposure values as sort of a heat map. Red is for overexposed or clipped detail, purple for underexposed or crushed detail, and skin tones should be in the gray, green, and pink areas. What's so intuitive about the point-and-click grading is it's easy to recover detail by clicking and dragging down on the red areas and recovering detail in the shadow areas by clicking and dragging up. For skin tones, it's the same. You also get easy batch processing for correcting and grading multiple images at once, so no more late-night editing sessions. It works in standalone mode and as a plugin for Lightroom and Photoshop on Mac and Windows.
I'll include a link in the description below, and for a limited time, you can take 20% off using coupon code Lightroom20 at checkout. And in case you thought I forgot, I'll also include a link to the presets for the looks that we created in this tutorial.
Well, I hope you found this tutorial helpful and it helps you to create a unique-looking style that sets you apart. For more grading videos, hit the subscribe button and then the bell to be notified of our next one. Let's make cinema-quality images.
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