Color Grading for Beginners

What is Color Grading?

Color grading is a post-production technique that involves boosting an image's color, saturation, and contrast. Because colors may quickly alter an image's overall ambiance, it's commonly employed to create certain moods in images. Color grading software includes Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, as well as online picture editors like Pixlr and Fotor.

Color Correction vs Color Grading

Color correction and color grading isn't the same thing;The differences among the two processes should be noted. 

Simply explained, color correction is the process of changing colors to get things as realistic as possible. The fact that perhaps the camera can't always catch the colors accurately is the major reason why color correcting is so important. This is particularly true when the illumination is difficult to work with and includes both natural and synthetic lighting effects.

For example, if your model's skin tone seems purple in your shot, you'll most likely need to make some tweaks to make it look more natural. This is a nice illustration of color correcting. However, if you're color grading a picture and want to produce a certain effect, you may intentionally modify the hue of skin tone to make it seem purple. 

It's a great way to begin with color correction to get the most out of your photo. If the natural appearance isn't what you're after, you may start color grading once you're satisfied the colors are true.

Getting Ready For Color Grading

Before you begin editing your photographs, you must consider about color grading. Change the file formats from JPEG to RAW when configuring your camera for such photography. This is significant because, when shooting in RAW, you may simply modify the white balance in Photoshop or Lightroom, even if you chose the incorrect option. 

If any of the colors in your photograph appear to be wrong, adjust the white balance in your image editing program until you get a natural look. If you really want deeper command over the hues in your image, you may also modify the temperature and tint.

Inspect your histogram to see if the colors are equally dispersed throughout the graph or clustered together in one part. If your highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks seem clustered, you may have to adjust them. After you've completed these fundamental tweaks, you may go on to color grading.

How to Color Grade Your Work

There are a lot of various ways to improve your photographs, so it's important to have a general notion of what type of ambiance you want to create with color grading. 

For example, if you want things to seem vibrant or muted, all you have to do is play about with the vibrance level. It's a simple yet powerful approach to change your image's overall atmosphere.

After you're happy with the vibrance, you may use HSL to improve your shot even more (hue, saturation, luminance). These sliders can impact the colors you want to pop in your image, and finding the correct mix might take some time — each of these three sub-panels has eight sliders (red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta).

Split tone is another something you should understand since it may take your color grading talents to the next level. Split tone is the process of adding distinct hues to highlights and shadows in a photograph; it may lend a unique touch to a photograph, especially in fine art portraiture. Because Lightroom has distinct panels for modifying lighting, balance, and shadows, split editing is simple.

Remember to keep a watchful eye on the spectrum when color grading — you don't want to go crazy with your edits and end up with tacky photographs instead of well-edited ones.

Using Color Grading Presets

You may buy and install several presets from third-party sources if you wish to boost your color grading procedure. Free presets may be found on a variety of websites, but you must ensure that they really are safe and virus-free.Installing these presets is simple: simply download the zip file, unzip the files, and import them into Lightroom. When you select an imported preset, Lightroom will apply it to your image automatically. If the results aren't to your liking, you may change the preset by moving several sliders till everything appears exactly right.

If you want to edit a large number of photos, presets can be difficult to utilize since lighting conditions vary from one shot to the next, and you'll have to spend a lot of time tweaking the initial setting.

By Arifa Hussain - Mataflax Media