Better Images With Color Grading

What is Color Grading

Color grading is the process of improving the appearance of an image for presentation in different environments. Various attributes of an image such as contrast, color, saturation, detail, black level, and white point may be enhanced whether for motion pictures, videos, or still images.

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In those images, shot by myself, you can see that the RAW image (left) has a cool (blue) feel to it, but I knew before I shot this, that I wanted a moody, old, grungy look. Older images are all have that warm (light orange) tone to them, so I knew that once I imported these images into Lightroom what sliders I needed to adjust.

Color grading enhances your images just like it does in movies. Check out this ‘Transformers’ trailer comparison. See how dramatic the bottom one looks compared to the top?

The top video is the color corrected version. The video at the bottom is the unmodified source. The source video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHRf01Gjosk I have a great dislike of "The Hollywood Look" which alters the palette of a movie to provide higher contrast or "pop" for skin tone.

Now you’re gonna look at movies differently, LOL. It’s something about those green shadows and yellow highlights that make the scenes look SOOOOOOO much better than the flat, bland, natural colors.

But How Do I Know What Colors To Use?

That question is a little more difficult. You just have to play around with complimentary colors. Basically you’ll get better with time and practice. Here’s some of my favorite YouTube videos that will help you learn and train your eyes to know which colors to play with.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create beautiful color grades in Photoshop. We will work on two projects where we will apply a color grade to a photo. We'll start by applying a blue, cold, color grade to this photo.

Get the Gradients: http://www.f64academy.com/use-adobe-color-themes/ One of my favorite tools in Photoshop is Adobe Color Themes. It is a neat little extension that helps you build color palettes around a central color that you have in mind. It can be very helpful in any sort of design work (which I usually need a lot of help with).

How to achieve the very popular "Teal/Orange" color grading look using Adobe Lightroom CC Thanks for watching! If you enjoyed the video be sure to like, comment, or subscribe. See you all in the next video!

Learning is INFINITE so don’t think you HAVE to get this concept PERFECT today! Take your time to explore YouTube more, watch multiple videos from different creators in order to get well rounded.