My Color Correcting / Grading
The steps I follow when Color Correcting and Color Grading
I say my color grading because this is what I like to do when not using a preset or having one in mind to use.
With a lot of my photos I can visualize my presets when taking and know for the most part how I need to expose for the preset to work best. When I shoot to shoot though I like going in and giving most of my photos their own personalities and like I said in my Blog Basics Over & Over keeping your mind sharp and challenging yourself helps you improve.
Just a side comment pressing Y in Lightroom Classic and monitoring areas during or even just after editing and making sure you are not loosing details helps so much. Checking your shadows for grain you might have caused helps so much too.
Above is the photo edited in the video I added. This was just simple Color Corrections I made in the photo. I could have went into the colors and changed more and given it a style, but I wanted something simple on this.
I made the sand have more of a darker contrast against my daughters hand, I brought out a more true skin tone in her hand and arm.
So Color Corrections is where Color Grading should start. Correct the image to the closest your eyes have seen; at least this is what every YouTube video has said and so far it has worked.
The next step if you want to move past Basic Color Corrections is to play around with the Color Mixer, sometimes I skip that and move onto the Calibration setting though. It can make ‘Cinematic Color Corrections’ at least that is what I like calling it.
I am adding a bit of a look to the photo but I am barely doing anything past the Color Corrections and sometimes such as in the photo below in my opinion it works very well.
Now I will Copy and Paste those settings onto one or two more photos and see how they turn out on them.
So we have some very yellow, yellows and some very blue, blues. Not bad for making some small corrections and tweaking a couple calibrations on one photo because now we have 3 edits from taking our time on one photo.
Now the car isn’t my ideal look that I had or would have with what was captured but it still works, it still looks really good.
This is more ideal for my preference, but this is more time consuming and more extensive with tweaking colors. It all depends on your preference. I think the steps I have come to follow have worked very well for me and might for someone else too, or maybe you will take something from this and create your own steps based off of it.
I need to find out how to add a comment sections to these, it would be super cool for people to comment their thoughts and ideas and helpful tips!
Again I am not as professional, I am not better than any other person. I have just tried my best learning so much and am still trying to learn and share knowledge at the same time.
This is a hand crafted and created Preset Pack ( 5 total presets) intended for use in Adobe Lightroom Classic
refunds are not available with download purchases.
