Beginning color grading

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DeMorcan
Posts: 326
Joined: 18 Sep 2020 18:19

Beginning color grading

Post by DeMorcan »

Beginning color grading

Color grading can be intimidating with all the options in Lightroom and Photoshop. It can also take a long time getting each color perfect and balanced. This will be short and basic for people who are used to my tomes.

What I am going to share here is a quick way for natural colors. It is based on an old Photoshop technique that still works well. Many times you see an over saturated and contrasty photos online. Some of which is the platform it is on. Some is from cranking up saturation and contrast. This is way to give a more natural look which not only works well for printing, but still looks nice on social media.

In photoshop to correct white balance across all colors (and white balance does not really do this due to algorithm used) make a duplicate layer. Then invert it. After you invert it, do an Average Blur which will give you one color. Change the blend mode to soft light (or overlay) and adjust the opacity to remove the color tint. This is basically to get the colors right. You may want to adjust the opacity to keep some of the color tint. Which white balance does not allow you to do. A slightly advanced use of this is to make an attached HSL layer and adjust the saturation and lightness of the correction layer. This is a fine tuning that again the white balance dropper in Lightroom cannot do. If you do not want them right, you can adjust the hue of this layer some to warm or cool the photo. If I do this, I prefer to do it separately after I have set the white balance this way. Of course this is only to be used on photos you want a correct white balance to work with.

Now you have the colors basically right we can purify them. Hit ALt+Ctrl+Shift+J. This will give you a layer with all of your adjustments. Invert this layer. Select the subtract blend mode. The adjust the opacity for the color strength you want. I start with 15%. This will also increase contrast. If the contrast is too much you can make an adjust to the inverted layer to lower contrast. I do this with an adjustment layer so I can fine tune it looking at the results. I do not care what this layer looks like, just the result. If you want a slightly more advanced use of this you can do the following. Because this purifies the colors, you can do an HSL adjustment layer attached to the invert layer to add some fine tuning on individual colors.

Other programs that use layers and invert will also work with this technique. It is quick to do and works with jpegs.
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