Transcripts
1. Introduction: Imagine you're out on a photo shoot, you find the perfect framing, perfect subject even the lighting looks great. So you snap your photo, you rush back home to edit it and you load it up in Lightroom and find out something, it looks bland. The colors aren't popping like you thought it would. Color tones are just not adding to the photo. What can you do to salvage your photo? It's very simple. You could do some very simple color grading to add new life to your shot. That's exactly what I'll be teaching you today in Adobe Lightroom Classic 2021, how to color grade your photos. My name is Tom Kai, and I've been a photographer and graphic designer for almost 12 years now. I'm from the United States and I travel around shooting photos and designing for various clients and companies specializing in fashion, lifestyle and commercial photography. I absolutely love what I do. You'll see a few examples of my work going across the screen now, but if you want to see more, please head over to my website at www.therealtomkai.com or look me up on Instagram @therealtomkai. I'm so excited to show you how you can quickly and easily transform your photos with some very simple color gradient techniques in the newest update of Adobe Lightroom Classic 2021. Today, I will show you exactly what color grading is. I will show you the emotion behind color, as well as color harmonies that are used in color grading. I will show you not just one, but eight different color harmonies you can use to color grade your photos, and I will be walking you through every step of the edit. At the end, I will also show you how you can create presets of these harmonies to be able to use them in feature edits to streamline your color grading process. Most importantly, I value your time, so that is why I am making this the only course you'll ever need to learn color grading in Lightroom. This course is for anyone who wants to learn how to color grade in Lightroom in a quick and efficient way and to take their photos to the next level. Whether you take photos just for fun or you want to make money doing this, learning proper color grading will really make your work stand out, and help it to catch the eyes of those you want it to. I can say from experience that this works. That's how I've landed some of my coolest clients. I'm super excited to share this course with you and I do truly hope that you decide to enroll. If you do, I'll be seeing you in the next video where we will dive straight into it.
2. What is color grading?: What exactly is color grading? In its simplest form, color grading is adjusting and enhancing the color, saturation, and contrast of an image to create a certain mood or look. For example, blue film make your images cool, orange and yellows will make it warm. But there's a whole lot more that goes into it. In order to calibrate an image properly, there are a few industry standard programs that are used. For photos, the majority of color grading happens in Photoshop and Lightroom. With the newest 2021 update of both of these programs, it is easier than ever to color grade your images. Today, we'll be focusing on Lightroom, as it now has a dedicated color grading tab, which is a total game changer. I've been asked before, "Hey, Tom, isn't color grading just correcting the color?" The answer is a big no. Color correction requires you to get the colors and lighting in your image to look as accurate as possible. As the name implies, you're correcting the color in an image. If the colors are blue when you want it to be neutral, you will need to fix that. However, in color grading, you might want to have a blue grade applied to your image because of the mood that you're trying to achieve. I always recommend that you have a color-corrected image before you even start color grading your image because you're just going to have a better time. Now, did you know that color grading starts before you even sit down in front of your computer? That's right. It starts the moment when you pick up your camera or even phones nowadays. You want to make sure that you're always shooting in raw format because that will allow us more flexibility when we get to editing. You also want to make sure you learn all the white balance features of your particular camera. Learning this can help you to have a properly color-corrected image before you even get into Lightroom. You can adjust for daylight, fluorescent, incandescent lighting, and a whole lot more. Okay, we've learned what color grading is, but why is color so important? Well, I'm going to show you, color means mood when it comes to photography, and in the next segment, I will show you the emotion of color and why it is one of the most crucial tools in any photographers' tool belt.
3. Emotions of color: No matter what color you think of, I can guarantee that you can associate a feeling to it. Not only that, I bet that you can even identify brands based off of colors and color combinations. Why is this important to us as photographers? It's very simple. When it comes to color grading, the goal is to create a certain mood or look to an image, and if you have the mood in mind, you can refer to colors that will bring those moods out. Let's take a look at all the major colors on the color wheel really quickly, and see exactly what they mean, what they're used for and where they may be used. The first and most popular color is probably red, and it's definitely the color of passion. Whenever you think of any passionate color, you think of red. That includes anger, that includes strength, that includes power, that includes a love. It is a huge color and used in many different places. Is definitely used to encourage, its use to draw attention to something, to stimulate, and it's heavily used in the entertainment industry, the food industry, the sport industry, and a lot more other, that's really used to show aggression. That is a really good use of the color red. Let's go onto orange. Orange is usually used as a color of encouragement. Again, what is orange? Is a combination of yellow and red. We're going to get to yellow in just a second. But combination of these two gives you the sense of encouragement, of warmth, of enthusiasm. This color is used to motivate and encourage people and expresses freedom. Again, it's used a lot in art and entertainment, in food and sport's, pretty much every industry uses this color, just fix of how optimistic and fun of a color that it is. Next, let's go on to yellow, that I just previously mentioned. Now what is yellow used for? Yellow, you usually think of happy, you think of positively, think of the sun. That's exactly what it means. It means youthful, it means fresh energy. You think of sunshine, and being uplifted, it stimulates the brain, it keeps you happy and clear thinking. It's definitely used to relax even, used to energize, which is opposite, but yellow can be a relaxing color. Now, yellow is also used to raise awareness. We see a lot of warning signs that are made in yellow, it catches your attention. That's a great use of yellow. This is definitely used in food and sports and transportation, and a plethora of different industries. Next, let's look at pink. Whenever you think of pink, you think of sensitivity. Pink is essentially red combined with white. White is a pure color, red is a color of passion. You combine passion with pure and you get a little bit of sensitivity. Now, whenever you think of pink, many times in popular culture, that is equated to love, to tranquility and to femininity. Now in modern days that has changed of course, but that is still what the industry thinks. That's important to keep in mind as well. A few other emotions that pink can convey is playfulness, admiration, compassion. Is definitely used to show these vulnerable emotions. It's really important to keep that in mind if you want to use this in your edits. Next, we have the color of blue. Blue is usually used as the color of trust. Now, whenever you think of blue, you think of the sea, the sky, and it generally tends to make people feel calm, gives you the sense of responsibility, of calmness, of relaxation. That's exactly what blue is used for. But you also know that blue is used to suppress appetite? That's why you don't see many fast food companies with the color blue, you usually see red and yellow. That actually increases appetite in people. When talking about blue, blue relaxes you, keeps you calm, keeps you mellow. That's a great thing If you want to calm down your image gives a sense of that relaxation and stillness. I use a lot of blue in my edits, in my images, and that is exactly the reason why I use it. I want to make my viewers feel calm and relaxed when they look at my images. Next we have green. Whenever you think of green, you think of nature, you think of trees, you think of grass, you think of life. That's exactly what green means. Its associated with growth, with health. It's also used to show safety harmony, a balanced. It evokes a feeling of abundance and balance. If you want to have some of that in your image, green is a great color to use. Personally, I do not like green. That is my personal preference. I don't use a lot of green in my images, but that may be one of the moods that you want to incorporate into your image. Keep that in mind as we move forward because we will be using green in some of the edits that we do today. Next, we have violate. Is one of my favorite colors, and violet is usually associated with the color of spirituality. It's associated with being rich, with being wealthy. It inspires reflection in self-awareness. Again, it's also a little bit more of a sensitive color, much like pink, so it definitely gives you that sense of compassion as well, that sensitivity, like I mentioned. This color usually inspires people, which is a really great use for. It's also used as a color of wisdom. When you think of purple in the brain, it triggers idea of wisdom. This is used heavily in the religious sectors and humanitarian sector. That's where you will see a lot of these colors being used. Now slowly we're getting to the end of these colors, and we're getting to some of the colors that you may think are not that important, but are actually very important. Next, we have the color brown. When you think of brown, you think of dirt, you think of the Earth, and that's exactly what it is. It is the color of the earth. Now, what does this mean? Brown is essentially the color of stability, of reliability, honesty, of comfort. Again, because if something is reliable and stable, you feel comfortable on it. If you want something to give you those emotions, so brown is a fantastic color to use. Some might think that Brown is dull color, but if you use it in a very purposeful way, it can be an incredibly powerful color to use in your edits. This color is heavily used in the agriculture industry and construction. This is where you will see brown used a lot, even in the legal sector. Now our second last color we're going to talk about is gray. Now I personally love to use different types of grays in my image, there are warm gray, cool gray, all different kinds of gray. Gray is the color of compromise, it's a neutral color, it's unemotional, it's detached, it's a conservative type of color, its a formal color. That's a motion that it tends to bring out of your image. It gives you some different types of grays, can even give a very contrasts and punchy image. Gray is usually use as a stabilizing color. It's like a mid-tone. When you think of black and white, in the middle, you have the gray. Gray is a middle, it's a neutral. It can definitely be used to bring some harmony and neutrality to your image. You will see gray used in pretty much every single industry that you can think of to some extent. Now the final color that I'm going to talk about today is the color black. When you think of black, you think of darkness, you think of a [inaudible] , you think of mystery, that's what black is a color of. Black also gives you the emotion of power, of control, of authority, of discipline, of elegance. It's a very sophisticated color to use. If you use it in a very deliberate way, it can be used to add a lot of mood and character to your images. Now, where would you use black? Black can be used to intimidate, it can be used to show authority like I mentioned, it can be used to create fear. There's a lot of negative ways you can use black. But you can also use it in a very positive way. Like I said, you can use it to show mystery, you can use it to show sophistication for malady. Usually think of a black tuxedo, and that's one way that black can be used. That's important to keep in mind. If you want to add a little bit of that to your image, black is a great color to use. Again, black is used in all industries. Every single industry uses a color black to some extent, it is a very important and powerful color. Now that we've learned the emotion of color, what each color means, what's the point? How are we even going to use all of this? Well, this is where color harmonies come in, because to create proper color grading, we need to use some kind of logic behind what we're doing. We can't just choose random colors. We can't just put brown with violet and pink and hope that it looks good. It might look good, but it might look horrendous. We need some kind of order and structure to base our color grading on. That's where color harmonies come in. In the next section, I'm going to go over eight different kinds of color harmonies that we will be using today, and which are super important to have in your arsenal as a photographer as we do some color grading. Let's keep going.
4. Color Harmonies: We're getting closer and closer to color grading our images. I know you want to hop right into it but, this is a final step to learn before we dive into Lightroom, and that is color harmonies. Today, I'll be showing you eight different color harmonies, and we will color grade in all eight ways. But what are the color harmonies? While instead of me just telling you what they are and let me show you, let's jump into my web browser to one of the best color harmony websites. We're in my web browser now and we are on Adobe color. Adobe has its own color harmony finding website and it's called Adobe color. You can just type in color.adobe.com and it's going to take you to this page. You're going to go to the Create Tab and you will see this color wheel. Now I'm going to go through this whole interface here, and I'll make sure you can sign in. So make sure you do that, I'm not signed in right now. But if you're signed in, you can save any set of colored harmony I have here and then you can use that in the Creative Cloud libraries. So if you save it here, you'll have that in Photoshop, you'll have that in Lightroom, in Fresco, in Illustrator everywhere and that is fantastic. First of all, I'm going to go through all of the color harmonies that we have on the site here and then I'm going to show you a few of the other tabs here, which will really help you out. First color harmony that I'm going to go over is the analogous color harmony. This is the one we're on right now. So what are analogous colors? As you can see here, analogous colors are colors that are right next to each other on the color wheel. In traditional art, these referred to just three colors. But we see here that we can have a group of up to five colors here, and you can bring these nodes closer in and you're able to adjust all of these down here. You can adjust the red value, the green, the blue, and the brightness. You can make this particular color, fill it with black, or you can have it be full on the color that is supposed to be and you can keep all of these colors, you can save it or you can just change one. If I want to change this particular color, let's say I want it to be more red. It's going to adjust all of them accordingly because it's keeping it as an analogous color harmony. So this one that you want to use if you want to have one type of tone to your image because these colors are going to be very similar to each other. Again, you can drag this around and this is going to allow you to have more of a gradient of different colors in your image. Which is one reason why I really like to use the analogous color harmony in my personal edits. Next we have the monochromatic and as the name implies, mono means one, chromatic means color, so monochromatic is just one color. This is all one color, except it's just a different level of brightness and saturation. So for this, we adjust how much black is in the color, how much white is in the color, how much a Grey is in the color. So we adjust all of those, and then we come up with five different colors. But it's all one color. It's all just different tones, different shades of the same color. I personally tend to stay away from monochromatic edits as I like to have a little bit more contrast in the colors in my images. However, this is a very powerful color harmony that you can use in your image because it can create some really fantastic effects. Next let's go to the triad color harmony. This is a really interesting one, because like the name implies, it uses three points on the color wheel. As you see, as I'm dragging this around it's keeping it equidistantly three points on the color wheel. Now we do have two points in the blue, two points in the yellow. But if you think about it, these middle three colors, these are always going to be the different colors. You can see we can just drag this around and that is really important to keep in mind. This is one of my favorite color harmonies to use because you can get some really interesting color combinations that work together. Don't forget, you don't just drag around. You can drag in and out on each of these nodes. Second, drag this to be more of a pastel and violet blue color. I can make this be more of a mint color and I can make this be more of that color. As you see, we have a very nice set of colors here that we can use in our edit, it's fantastic. Next we have complementary colors. This is probably one of the most basic color harmonies and easiest to understand because complementary, it just means the opposite side of the color wheel. So we see here we have this pink color here, opposite to that is this green. If we go to orange, the opposite of that is blue. If we go to this type of red orange, we have cyan and look, we have this up here. We have this set of colors. It's a really nice color combination, it's a very nice harmony to use. So moving on, we have split complementary and that's very similar to the regular complementary. As we see, one of the sides is just split. So if I drag this all the way out, what this is essentially doing is, it's taking the complementary color of your base here which in our situation here is this green, and it's splitting it equidistant to two directions. We have this side, it goes to an orange color, this side goes to this very bright magenta color, and we can adjust how much it's splitting that complementary so we can bring it in to be just a little bit off from the split or you can have it be wider split. I personally tend to keep it more close to the split because I find that it looks better. But you can get some really interesting color combinations with this, very interesting harmonies that I'd like to use a lot in my edits, because it really creates those unique looking images that you really wouldn't think of normally. Next, let's go to double split complementary, and as the name implies, we have a double split on our complementary color. So we have our main color here and what double split is it's going to split it on the complementary, like for the split complementary, but now it's also splitting from our main color here. You see we have two more nodes here that go out and again, you can adjust how much this is splitting, but this time it's adjusting both sides. Again, for this I tend to keep it rather close to the split, but definitely experiment with it. Sometimes going crazy with the split can actually create a very unique look to your image, very nice. Next, let's go to square. So a square, is essentially just going to be a square of colors on your color wheel. A little bit confusing, isn't it? Well, just think of this as a plus sign going across all your colors. You can rotate that and then you have your four main points. Now in this example we have five that's just how the color wheel here works. But you can always take one of those colors, shift that in, and then you have a whole different color to work with as you shift the rest around. So this can be also a very interesting tool to use and you can again bring some of these more in, more out as you would like. I tend to find the muted tones work a lot better for me personally. But again, your style might require you to use heavy red or very saturated green. So play around with this, you can get some really cool colors and again, you can save it and use it wherever you like. The final color harmony we're going to go over today is compound. Let's look at compound. Now the way that I remember compound personally is that it essentially is in the letter k. K for compound doesn't make too much sense, doesn't. But if you look at this, this essentially goes around in a k so what exactly does this mean? So the way I like to explain this is, imagine if this was a complementary color, we'd have a straight line going to the opposite side, except it's also split. However, the splits are going to just one side. So we see the split is going off to the right, here it's also going off to the right. If we would like to switch it around, we just pull this up here and now it's split off to the left. Both of these extra nodes are split off to the left and this can be a very interesting tool to use. I personally don't use compound color harmony a lot, it is definitely one that is a little bit more complex to use. But if you learn to master this, this can also be a very powerful harmony to use because as you can see, this is a very nice set of colors that we have here, you can use this in a very unique way. Now we do have two more color harmonies here that I'm not going to be using today, but I will explain what they are. Shades is essentially one color and different shades of that color. So we can see here, all that's changing essentially is the darkness of the color. We see some of the other values here are changing. But essentially, for shades you're creating different shades of that color, you're adding black to that color. So you can pick any color on the color wheel and we have our middle color here, and we're either adding more black to it or taking Black away. So that's essentially what shades is, it's very similar to monochromatic, very similar. But it's a little different because with shades the add black to it only. With monochromatic you can add white to it as well and Grey. So with shades, I'm not going to touch on that too much today, but I will explain to you what it is. Finally, here we have custom, where you can create your own custom color harmony if you want to experiment, do something crazy, maybe not on one of these color harmonies, you can just click around get something very unique like this is more of a five-sided star type of shape, you can save that as a harmony and use it in your own edit. Now, one last thing I'm going to show you here on the Adobe Color website before we dive into Lightroom, is this Explore tab, this is super important and super handy. Let's click the Explore tab and what the Explore tab is going to show you. It's going to show you a bunch of preset color harmonies that people have already come up with. A lot of the times people base color harmony off of an image. For example, we have this image of some coral here, and people have come up with a color harmony based off of the colors in this image. You can add it to your library or download it as a JPEG and reference it in Photoshop, in Lightroom anywhere where you'd like to use it. So you can go through here, find some really interesting colors and not only that, you can search different colors. So for example, let's say I want something to be more of a summer day, so I can type in, summer. This is going to give us some color harmonies that people have created with the idea of summer in mind. So this is a very nice pastel summer, this was very tropical type of summer color palette here. This is really useful, especially when you're getting started out just to see exactly where people get these color harmonies from. It's a very great way to educate yourself and I highly recommend you do this. Take a look at some images and try and create your own color harmonies based off of those images. So let's hop over into Lightroom and let's get started with our color grading.
5. Import + New Interface: We are finally in Lightroom. Now these images you see this is from one of my previous courses, which you can feel free to go ahead and check it out. It's 15 Lightroom tips and tricks. But definitely go ahead and load up your newest version of Lightroom 2021 version because that is exactly what we're using today. Let's go ahead and import our images really quickly. Now if you haven't already, make sure you download the images that I've provided. Download them and we're going to import them. So let's go ahead and do that together, shall we? Let's click "Import" here in the bottom left. It's going to bring you this dialogue box, I'm just going to navigate to the images we used. This is the folder that I'm going to provide you with, all your images that have been used in this course. We're going to have our three images selected here. These are all raw images. We have NEF format, DNG, and CR2. These are all raw images. So let's go ahead and click "Import". It's going to take a second. It's going to import all three of those images. Now let's shift click on all of these. I like to always put my images into collections. So let's create a collection and let us go ahead and call this one Color Grading. You want to make sure you have this option check, include selected photos. That's why we selected all three of these because we want these three images to be included in this collection. So let's click "Create" and now we have another collection here called Color Grading. Very nice. Now one more thing I'm going to quickly show you with the new interface is, we now have a new area here in our Develop tab. This is what we're going to be using today for everything. If we scroll down here, we no longer have the section called split toning. We used to have a section here called split toning. Let me tell you something. That used to be my favorite section but now we have something even better. We now have a dedicated color grading tab, which allows us to adjust the midtones, the shadows, the highlights, the blending, the balance, and we can adjust everything separately. We can do just the shadows, just the midtones, just the highlights, or we can do a global adjustment, which we will probably do, which we will do for our images. But you can also see all three of them at one. This is something you want to be mindful of. I will be going through this and all eight of the color harmonies that we'll be practicing together. If it looks a little bit daunting right now, just hang tight, I'll explain everything here for you. Let's get going and let's start with our very first color harmony, and that is analogous.
6. Analogous: We're finally ready to get started color grading. Now, the first color harmony we're going to do together is analogous. If you remember what analogous is, those are colors that are right next to each other on the color wheel. Let's go ahead and do this. Let's select our first image here. We're going to go with this image, it's titled Model Portrait, and we're going to go into our develop tab. Very nice. As you see, no edits have been made to this image. We're going to do a very basic edit before we get started. Let's go ahead and let's just click Auto. Let's see what Lightroom is going to do. Not too bad. The highlights are a little bit too much for me. I'm going to bring that down. Same with the whites and the exposure as well. Let's keep it like that. We essentially just want to have a nicely exposed image with no different types of colors included, no color wash over anything. We're going to do that down in the color grading tab. We're not going to do anything with the tone curve today. We're not going to do anything with the HSL slider today. Everything is going to happen here in the color grading. Let's go ahead and let's choose our first set of colors. Like I said, analogous are three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. First of all, let's look at this image. For the shadows I might want to add a little bit of blue to it. Let's go ahead and let's find a nice blue image. Again, if you go in and out it's going to change the saturation of that color. We want to add some blue to our image. Let's go somewhere in the middle. Very nice. Now, this here is going to be for the highlights. Now for the highlights I might want to bring that a little bit closer to the magenta side, but I don't want that to be so saturated. I'm going to bring the saturation of that down all the way, and you see the numbers up here. We have saturation at 38. Then we have our mid-tones, which for the sake of this I'm just going to bring into the middle of these two colors. Again, I don't want this to be very saturated at all. Let's go ahead and bring that to nearly non-existent. Not bad. I might even bring the saturation of this down. Very nice. Now, don't forget if you hold down shift, you see the little line appears same for up here and same for down here. If you hold down shift, you're not going to change the color, you only going to change the saturation of that color. If you want to make sure you keep a particular color, you just hold down shift and then you can adjust it accordingly. Very nice. For this blue let's increase that a little bit. Very nice. Now what do these sliders down here do? Well, these sliders down here are going to adjust the luminance. We see L over on our colors here we have the hue which is at 244. We have our saturation means that 93 and then we have L. L is our luminance, and that is how much black or white is in a particular color. If we want to bring the luminance of the blue and the shadows up, we might want to bring that up a little bit, give that nice washed-out look. I might want to do the same for our magenta highlights. You can play around with this. For the magenta highlights, I might actually put the luminance down a little bit. I'm going to pull the luminance back on the blue. For the mid-tones here, let's see what looks better together. Shall we? I might just increase the luminance ever so slightly. Very nice. You do want to make sure you look at a histogram up here, make sure none of the colors are peaking too much. Very nice. Now we have these two sliders down here called blending and balance, so what do these do? More blending is going to essentially dictate how much of a gradient is between each of these colors. If we don't have a lot of blending, there's going to be very harsh difference from the shadows to the highlights. Now if we increase the blending and there is going to be a lot of blending that happens between the shadows and the magenta. You see that's a big wash of color that's over all of this. When it comes to color grading, a little bit goes a long way. I always say that in every single one of my courses a little bit goes a long way. In fact, I might want to turn the blending down ever so slightly. Very ice. Now what does the balance do? Well, the balance is going to favor one side of the color grading over the other. For example, we have our shadows and highlights. If we have the balance beam over to the left, we see it's favoring more of this blue that's in the shadow. If we balance it over to the other side, more of that magenta is coming through in our highlights. You definitely want to play around with this. I might want this to favor a little bit more of the blue side. However, having it be in the middle actually looks fairly good for this image. Very nice. Now if I wanted to adjust any of these separately, I definitely could do that. I could go in to adjust the shadows, get more specific with my color and luminance. You can adjust everything right here. You can just go over to your mid-tones, your highlights everything, but now we also have this one tab here which is our global. Now what are we going to do with global? We're going to use this to essentially just increase the luminance of everything in the image or decrease the luminance. You can do that or you can add a color wash over everything that we've done. If you want to keep going with the theme that we have, we can add a little bit more of a cooler color to our image that has a very high luminance if we wanted to. You don't have to do this. In fact, I'm going to add that just a very slight global adjustment of just another little bit of a violet color here for the slightly increased luminance. What does this look before and after color grading? You can just toggle this off and this is our before, this is our after color graded. It has a lot of that moody, cool, purple, blue, magenta color grading to it. But what if we want to do some other types of color grading? Let's look at this image here. This one is called the Grunge Photoshoot, and we're going to do essentially the same thing. We're going to do another analogous color edit to this image. But what we're going to use some different colors this time. This time, let's go for one up here from cyan green to yellow. For the shadows, I probably want to add some cyan into that. Let's go ahead and do that. We have a nice cyan here. Now for the highlights, we want to go with light yellow. Let's try and get a nice yellow in there. As you see, it's not looking too good right now, is it? We'll make it look better. For the mid-tone, we're going have a little bit of a green. It's going to be more of a mint color. Now, for a cyan here we really want to darken that down. Let's bring the luminance of that down a little bit. Not too bad. I might want to bring the saturation of that down as well. Now when it comes to the yellow, let's play around with that. See what luminance works best. I want to bring the luminance of that up just a little bit. We're increasing it by about 13. Again, I might want to decrease the saturation. Very nice. We're getting that cinematic look that you might find. As you see our saturation is a very low on all of these. You really don't want to go too high ever when it comes to color grading, because your image is not going to look very good. I'll show you on our third image what it would look like if you go intense with this color grading process. Just to show you why it's important to keep things subdued. As for the green like I said, I want this to be more of a mint color, so we're going to desaturate that and we're going to bring some lightness up. Very nice. For the blending, I want there to be a little bit less blending and I want the balance to be more on the cyan side. Very nice. Now our image looks a lot better. I enhanced that grunge feeling that was already in this image. There's a lot of concrete in here. She's wearing some jeans. I tried to bring out that grunge color, the greens and cyans in that image. Again, let's look at the before and after. I'm not going to add a global color grade to this one. Before, it looks blur now that I turned the color grading off. With the color grading on, it has a big pop of color. Very nice. Let's look at our last image here. It's called Landscape. What if we went really crazy with this. I want to make this a very warm color. We're going go from orange over to magenta. We're going to use this section of our color wheel. Let's use this version of our color grading tabs so we seeing exactly what we're doing. For my shadows, let's say I want this to be very much in this pinkish magenta type of color. You're going to see quickly that this is going to look very horrendous. For mid-tones I want to have a bright orange. For my highlights I want it to be a very bright yellow. I want to yellow to be very luminous. I want my shadows to be opposite of that, I want to darken those down. This looks horrible, doesn't it? But how can we use the same analogous color harmony here with these colors to make this image look good. Very simply. First of all, we're going to take this magenta all the way down for our shadows. For the luminance we'll bring that back just a little bit. Very nice. You can just drag on this little point here just to drag the color itself around and it's not going to change the amount of saturation that the color has. Let's go ahead and get a nice red color. Let's look at our mid-tones. Again, let's go ahead decrease the saturation of that. You might want to increase the luminance just a little bit, and refine our color. As for our yellow, again, we don't want that to be super saturated. Very nice. The luminance we can bring that down to be about 27. As for the blending, I want there to be more blending in this image. I want to have a very summary, almost a sepia tone look to our image. Now, I'm going to balance this more to the right this time. I want to bring out more of the oranges and yellows that are in the highlights as opposed to the reds. This is up to your personal preference. Let's go ahead. Let's go to about plus 40. Very nice. Again, you can go and adjust any of these colors as much as you would like, keeping in mind that we're doing the analogous color harmony. There we go. You might find in some situations the colors work, sometimes it doesn't. That is totally fine. It's fun to play around and see what works because this is how you learn. For example, I'm finding that this color combination doesn't work too well for this particular image. But if we were to do something similar to the first image and add some blues to our shadows, add a little bit of cyan to our highlights just a little bit, and in our mid-tones we have some mid-tone blues, we can very quickly get an image that might actually look fairly decent. Let's go ahead and try to do that, shall we? This cyan is a little bit too much. I want to bring the saturation down. I want to focus more on the shadows there. Let's balance it more to the left. There we go. Having a cool look to this is actually working out a little bit better. Let's decrease the luminance, make that darker. Now for the highlights, let's go ahead increase the luminance for that. For the mid-tone we can essentially keep it where it is. We talk about the before and after, we've created a whole different mood and atmosphere to this image, we've created an almost an early morning type of moody feel to this image. Very nice. Next we're going to go over the monochromatic color harmony.
7. Monochromatic: We're ready to do our next color harmony and that is monochromatic. But before we do that, we need to have a fresh version of our images to work with, because we're going to edit the same images in all eight different ways. How are we going to do that? Well, let's select all of our images. Just click and then shift click to select all of them, then you right-click, and then you can simply just do "Create Virtual Copies." Now we have a set of virtual copies that already have that edit applied to it but, for example, let's go to this image, it's copy 1, and what you can do in the Develop tab, you can simply reset your image to what it was before. So we have a fresh image to work with. Let's get started with monochromatic color harmony. If you remember, monochromatic harmony is using one color and using the different shades that exist within that color. For example, if we were to use red, will we use red plus black, or red plus white? That's the color that we're going to use, so for example, in this image. Let's go ahead and let's do another cooler tone. If we use the same blue, we're going to use the same hue. Hue means color. We're going to use hue of 234. That's going to mid-tones and we're going to type that same hue into everything, 234 and make sure our saturation is at 100 just so we see what this looks like. So 234 and 100, and we are quickly going to see this image is not going to look very good. So 234 for the hue, saturation, 100. That does not look good, does it? That's why we need to create different shades and tones of this image. Let's go ahead and do that, shall we? For the shadows here, I do want this to be fairly saturated. Now saturation is essentially adding gray to the image. We can definitely do that in our monochromatic color harmony. Let's go ahead, have one that's a little bit desaturated, and the luminance of that, we're going to [inaudible] that all the way down, we want the shadows to be fairly dark. Very nice. Now for our highlights, we want that same key, but our saturation, we want it to be all the way down. We don't want that to be very saturated. Very nice, and we want the luminance of that to be as high as possible, not too bad. Now let's look at our mid-tones. Let's bring our mid-tones down as well. I don't want that to be too saturated, and for the luminance of that, we can bring that up, I'm going to bring that up all the way to 100. Again, we can change the blending and balance in our image, so let's see what that's going to do to our image. If we bring the blending all the way to the left, we can see what that's done, bringing it all the way to the right, it's blending those colors a lot more. I'm actually going to bring it a little bit to the right, probably by about, let's bring it up to 63, and for the balance, do we want this to be balanced more to the shadow side or to the highlight side? Now, this is again up to preference. This is essentially going to lighten or darken this image since we're using the monochromatic color harmony, so that's something to keep in mind as well. I might bring it slightly to the right, now set it by about plus 10. Very nice. We are not going to do global adjustment to this one either, well, let's talk about our before and after. Before, after, before and after. That's a drastic change to our image. Again, you can go in and do other edits after this, so, this isn't the end-all, but generally, you do want to do color grading near the end of your image, but that's not the final step, you can still do other adjustments if you would like. Let's go ahead and do the same color harmony to our other images as well. Lets hop over to our grunge photocopy that we have, and let us go ahead and reset that. Very nice. I'm going to do a similar color harmony and try and get a similar grunge color. Let's go ahead and find a color that's going to look good for this. I did like the sign that we were working with, so we have a hue of 187. Let's go ahead and add that to everything, 187, saturation of 100. Same for the highlights, hue of 187, saturation of 100. Now all of these have the same hue, it's the same color, it's monochromatic, but it looks horrible, it looks like someone just put [inaudible] gel filter over this camera and took a photo. Let's go ahead and fix that. Again, I'm going to start with the shadows and tweak our settings here. First of all, I do want to bring the saturation down just a little bit, and again, I'm focusing on the shadow areas, I'm not looking at the highlight and mid-tone colors, I'm looking specifically at the shadows to know what I'm doing. I want to bring the luminance down a little bit. Very nice. I'm going to actually jump over to our mid-tones here. Now I want to bring the saturation of that all the way down, I only want a little bit of saturation there, and I do want to bring the luminance of that up. Just like so, [inaudible] , and let's go into our highlights where again, we can desaturate that, and as you see, our image is starting to look more normal. Let's bring that down to about 17 saturation and luminance. Again, this is up to your preference. I'm going to add about plus 40 to this, and as you see, we are clipping a little bit on the yellows here. Let's see if we can fix that. Again, that is on the black, so we want to go over to our shadows and see if we can fix that. We might want to bring that up ever so slightly. We can see now the red is clipping, so you can definitely tweak a few of these settings here. You can even change the saturation of the colors. For the sake of this, let's go ahead and increase our luminance to the point where it's not clipping. There we go. As you see, it has that washed out look, which isn't too bad, but let's go over to our highlights again, and let's play around. I want to bring the luminance of that to the opposite way since I have to wash out the colors here for the shadows, I'm going to try and fix that. Now we have our blending. So do we want this to be just blend it a little bit between our colors, or do we want the blend to be intense? I don't want it to be that intense. I'm actually going to bring the blending down to about 10. It's going to be very little blending between these different colors. As for the balance, do we want the balance to be favoring the shadow sides or the highlights? If we favor the shadows, that's the look, if we favor the balance to be on the other side, this is what's going to happen. I'm going to go to a little bit in the positive direction. I'm going to go to about 27. Very nice. Now if we toggle before and after, we've created another type of grunge look using a monochromatic color palette. It's very nice. Now let's hop over to our final image, our landscape, and see if we can create a monochromatic edit to this monochromatic color grade. Let's reset this image, and let me pick a nice color that I would like to use. Looking at my color wheel, I'm going to want to choose something that's in the orange family. Let's go ahead, and let's do a hue of, let's say a hue of 24. Let's go ahead and add that to everything, hue of 24, saturation 100, very nice, and highlights hue of 24, saturation of 100. Again, this looks horrible. What are we going to do about this? Well, let's go ahead and edit it. Let's go and look at our mid-tones. I'm going to start with our mid-tones this time. I want the mid-tones to be nearly nonexistent. I'm going to turn the saturation all the way down to 15, and I'm going to give an extra little bit of luminance to our mid-tones in our image, not bad. Now for our shadows, definitely I want to desaturate that because orange can be a very heavy color. Let's desaturate that. Let's bring them luminance of that down. As you see, we've added a bunch of contrast down here, which is really nice, I'm actually really liking that. As for the highlights, let's bring the saturation down to nearly middle level. Let's go to about 35. Let's do 40 for the saturation, and the luminance, we're going to bring the luminance up a little bit. We've added a little bit of a warm tone to our whole image. That was the goal for this monochromatic edit. Now what about our blending? Do we want it to be very deep blending, a lot of blending happening or not that much? In this case, I want it to be a little bit intense actually. I want it to go up to about 65. As for the balance, let's see, should we favor balancing towards the shadows or to the highlights. Now I'm personally going to favor the balance closer to the shadow. So I'm just going to go down just a little bit, minus 8. It's always fairly nice to begin with, but I went down a little bit just to get also some detail back into our clouds. Let's look at the before and after. This is before and after. We've added contrast and we've also added a whole warm color over everything. That's fantastic. Next, let's go over a triad color harmony. Let's keep going.
8. Triad: Now we're going to start to get into some of the interesting color harmonies, some of my favorites. The first of which is, the triad color harmony. So if you remember earlier when we talked about this, this is going to use a triangle of colors on our color wheel, essentially. Let's get started with that. Now we want to create more virtual copies of everything. So let's select the first one in all of these and we're simply just going to right-click, create virtual copies and now we have another round of virtual copies. Very nice. As you see, it's applied to edit that was in the original, but we're going to get rid of those. So again, let's start with our model here, so let's click Develop tab and let's reset our image. For this particular one, I'm going to adjust all three colors at once so we see the three colors on our color wheels here. Okay. So let's get started. For the shadows, I'm going to want to have somewhat of a purplish blue kind of color. So let's go ahead and find a nice purple. So for now I'm just focusing on the hue, I'll fix a saturation later. So let's pick something like that. Very nice. Now for the mid tones, I'm actually going to go over here to be somewhat in our cyan green area. Very nice. For the highlights, I'm actually going to go into the oranges, something between yellow and orange. So as you see, this is essentially a triangle. We have our purple, our cyan and our orange. So this is going to be a triad of colors. Very nice. Let's make this actually look good, shall we? So let's start with our mid tones, because our mid tones are fairly intense right now. Let's go ahead and bring the saturation of that down. I just want a little bit of that cyan in there. Let's bring the luminosity of that up. Very nice. Now fore our shadows, let's go ahead and desaturate that just a little bit. I like how that looks; and let's bring the luminosity of that up a little bit. Luminance, let's bring that up to about plus 21. For the highlights, I definitely want this to be very subdued, to be more of a cream color. Not bad. The luminance of that, I'm going to bring that up all the way to about 80. Let's go to about 80 as close as we can get. That's very nice. I like how that's looking and as for the blending, let's look at what this is going to do. Now that we have more colors and play, things might look a little more intense. So we can blend all the way to 100 and you can see that's using a lot of that purplish color here, blending that into our orange cream color. Or we can have no blending whatsoever and more of our mid-tones are going to come through. I'm actually going to keep the blending near the middle, I'm going to go about 58 close to 60. As for the balance, I want the balance to be again, all the way to the left of that purple magenta color or all the way to the right, where I have that cream color in our highlights. Now, I'm actually going to favor the cooler side of this. I'm going to go to about minus 12. Not bad. Let's go to our global adjustment here and let's just bring up the luminance of our entire image to about plus 78. That's looking fairly decent. Now let's look at the before and after of this. Before and after. That's a substantial change using just the triad there and you can see some of the cyan in the mid tones. You can see that cream color in the highlights and you can see that purple that we put into the shadows. Very nice. So let's go over to our grunge photo here. We're going to reset that and I'm going to try and create a whole different feel to this grunge image. So this time, I'm going to use similar colors, but there'll be used in different places. So for this time for the shadows, I'm going to add an orange to our shadows. Very nice, and in fact, I'm going to add that purple to our mid tones. Let's go ahead and do that. Like I said, it's fine to play around with this because you might find color combos that actually look really cool and really interesting. So we see here we have our three colors, we have are orange again, we have our cyan green and we have our purple. Very nice. But this doesn't look good at all. Let's go ahead and fix that. So again, let's bring the saturation all the way down in our Shadows. Very nice, and let's bring the luminance of that down. Not too bad. Now for the mid tones, let's desaturate our mid tones. We do want to make sure we see that there's purple there, and we'll do that by increasing the luminance a little bit, not bad. For our highlights, let's take the saturation now down to about 50. Let's increase the luminance. Very nice. So now our image looks a lot better, not bad. As for the blending, let's take the blending of this closer to our highlight side this time. Let's go to about 74 and our balance, let's have this be balanced more to the shadows so we see the different kind of look, so let's go to about minus 17. As you see, we have more of that orangey brownness in our image. As you see, we are clipping a little bit in the dark set. So in order to fix that, we can just go to our shadows here, bring the luminance up of that, and we fix that, and we're peaking on the highlights. You can go to our highlights and just bring that down until nothing is peaking. Very nice. Let's do a little bit to get rid of the green peaking; and we're perfect. Nothing is peaking and that's our edit here. Let's look at the before and after, before, after. So we've added a warmer tone to this image and that's really transformed it, it's given a different kind of a grunge look. Very nice. Now let's go ahead and apply that same theory, same harmony to our nature here. So let's reset, and this time we're going do things even more different. We're going to flip the three triads even further. So first of all, let's go ahead and add a nice deep blue to our shadows. I always like adding blue to my shadows, it's one of my favorite things to do. Now for my highlights, I'm actually going to go ahead and add, let's go ahead and add a nice pink magenta color. For our mid tones we are going to add a green. This doesn't look good, does it? It looks horrible in fact, but I'm going to make it work. Let's go ahead and do that. Now for the shadows, I'm going to bring that down just a little bit and increase the luminance. I like where the blues are at. For the mid tones, definitely, I want to reduce the saturation of that and I might even want to increase the luminance ever so slightly. But this pink is way too much for the highlights, so we're going to bring that all the way down. Right. So I want to have a little bit of that in our image. So we have about 23 percent of saturation there and we're going to have the luminance of that be increased as well to about 26, there is a little bit of that pink magenta in our highlights. But let's go ahead. Again, we see our shadows are peaking in the red, so we're going to bring the luminance up just a little bit. Perfect, and we're almost peaking in our whites, but not exactly. So for the blending, I'm actually going to reduce the blending just a little bit, down to 41. For the balance, I'm going to favor the balance of our shadows here. Very nice. So now we have another triad, edited nature photon. If we look at the before and after, before and after. We've totally transformed the feeling of this image, it's crazy. So now let's move on. Let's go on to complementary colors.
9. Complementary: I've gone ahead and created more virtual copies of our images here and we're going to be moving on to the complimentary color harmony. Now if you remember, this is a one more on the color wheel, you're using colors that are on opposite side. This is a very simple one to use. Let's use this image. Let's go ahead, go into our Develop tab, and let's reset it to our original settings here. My personal favorite complimentary color combo is a cyan-orange color combination. I absolutely love using that color combo. Let's go ahead and add a nice cyan-turquoise type of color to our shadow, and then to our highlights we're going to add a nice orange. As for the midtones, that's entirely up to you. You can add that to also be orange or also be cyan depending on the photo. For right now, I'm actually not going to have anything and I'm going to see what our image is going to look like because it's just two colors that we essentially need to use. For the shadows, let's reduce the saturation to about 49, 50 percent will do. Let's bring the luminance of that down, not bad. Then for the orange part, again, let's desaturate that, very nice, and let's increase the luminance of that. What I might want to do, I might want to add a little bit of orange into our midtones. We're using a hue of 34, so let's try and find that same hue here, hue of 34, and we want to bring the saturation of that very much down, just about 18 percent, not bad. As for the blending, I'm going to favor more of a higher blending here, let's go to 64. As for the balance, I'm going to actually favor the balance towards the shadow side but only by a little bit, minus 10. Now if we do before and after, we've really created that cyan-orange edit in this image. This is my personal favorite style to use. I use cyan-orange combination everywhere, nearly all of my photos to some extent. Let's go over to our grunge image. Let's reset this and I'm going to do a very similar type of thing. But this time I'm going to use a few different colors. I'm going to use a light blue and a red. It's similar but different. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add light blue into our shadows and I'm going to add the exact opposite of red into our highlights. Again, it's the same thing. It's all about subduing yourself, not going too crazy with the colors. You want to bring the saturation down once you have the color you like of both sides, very nice. Again, you can choose what you want to do with your midtones, I might want to have this also be towards the red side here. Obviously not as high saturation, maybe just 13 is good enough there. I do want to bring the luminance up of our midtones. Let's bring the luminous down of our highlights, and of the shadows, lets bring it up ever so slightly. Not bad. As for the blending, do you want us to blend a lot or a little? It doesn't have too much to blend here, so I'm actually going to bring the blending all the way up to 100. As for the balance, what side do we want to favor? I'm actually going to keep this balanced in the middle for this particular edit. Lets look at the before and after; before, after. You can really see that there is some light blue-cyan type of color in the shadows and there's some red in the highlights. Fantastic. Let's go over to our landscape and I'm going to apply the similar cyan-blue edit to this particular landscape. Let's go ahead and find a nice type of cyan, very nice. For the highlights, let's go for a nice orange that's on the other side of our color wheel. Perfect. Saturation goes down on both sides, not bad. Midtones can go to the side of the orange. Let's bring the luminance down, I want to have a little bit more contrast, and yes, I am clipping a little bit but you can not really see where it's clipping. It's not too bad. I'm going to keep that as it is. As for the blending, I'm going to have this fairly centered. The balance, I'm going to balance it just as it is in the middle, I'm not going to actually shift that at all. Let's take a look at the before and after; before, after. It makes that look a little bit more dramatic, a little bit more cinematic. The cyan-blue color combo is a very cinematic type of color harmony to use. Perfect. Let's move on to one of my favorites, is the split complementary color harmony. Let's keep going.
10. Split Complementary: We're onto the split complementary color harmony. As you see, I've created another set of virtual copies. As we're going through all of these, you can see the different looks that we're able to add to one image. This is all different types of color grading that you can do to your images, and you can find out which works for you the best. Let's go ahead and let's do some split complimentary color harmony, color grading. Let's start with our first image here model portrait. Let's click "Develop" and let's reset. As you see. the more you do this, the faster that you're going to get at it, the faster you're going to catch on to what all the different colors are. If you remember correctly, the split color harmony, we'll use one base color and then two colors that are little bit split off from the complimentary. What we're going to do here is, let's find a nice base color for our mid-tones here. I'm actually going to choose somewhat of a lime type of color, almost a yellow actually. Let's use yellow, that's almost a cream color. So it's going to be the opposite of that, we're going to have a blue, that's right over here. I'm going to reserve that for the shadows here, and I'm going to bring that to the right here. I want to make sure that the shadows are more on the violet side. Let's bring the saturation of that down ever so slightly. The highlights, that means it's going to go the opposite of a hue of 56. So if we have hue of 56 here, the opposite of that is going to be here. Split off to the side, it's going to be a light blue cyan type of color. I want to definitely bring the saturation of that down. Very nice. Let's increase the luminance of our mid-tones and over shadow, I won't to increase the luminance of everything. This is a very nice color harmony here and a color combination, actually, I like this. Let's increase the blending just a little bit. Let's bring that up to about 63. Let's balance that more to the shadow, just a little bit, maybe minus 8, nothing more than that. Let's look at the before and after. This is one of my all-time favorite color harmonies to use when I color-grade. That's a split, complementary. It's a fantastic one to use. Let's go ahead and do another split complementary edit, to our grunge photo shoot image. Let's reset this and let's go ahead and do another one of these. Let's go ahead and find a nice mid-tone color. I want our mid-tone to be more of a purple. Let's see if we can make this work. A mid-tone of purple, obviously we're going to want to desaturate that, not bad. The opposite of that will be a lime color. The split off from that will be a yellow, orange, and a green, almost a cyan, but I would say it's more of just a green. What do I want to be green? What do I want to be more yellow? Let's go ahead and add the yellow split off to our shadows and we're going to add the green to our highlights. We're going to try and make that look good. So let's bring the saturation of our highlight split off and down. Let's bring the saturation of our shadows down to about 32. Very nice. Let's bring the luminance up. Very nice. It's creating almost like a sepia tone look to our image. We're going to increase the luminance ever so slightly for our highlights, and as for our mid-tones, we're going to decrease that. We can definitely see some of that blue violet up in this corner here. Let's see if we can make this look even better with our blending imbalance. As for the blending, I want to decrease that to about 35. Let's balance that more towards our mid-tones and highlights. Let's bring that up. So you see now we have a really interesting color combination here where we have some blues up here, some greens down here, oranges. It's a very interesting color combination. Not too bad. Let's look at the before and after. It's a really interesting color grading to do. Then have fun with this. You can really do amazing things. Let's look at our landscape. Let's go ahead and reset that. Let's go ahead and do something very similar. Let's pick ourselves a base color to work with. I'm going to go with a base color for our mid-tones of a red. The opposite of that would be a cyan. If we split off from that, we would have a greenish cyan and we would have a blue. I'm going to make the shadows be down here in the blue and I'm going to have the highlights be up here in our greens. This looks absolutely horrendous. I do not like it, but let's go ahead and make it look good. Let's bring our red of the mid-tone down to about 42 percent. Not too bad. We definitely going to want to bring the saturation down of everything that we have here. I'll keep the blue at about 60 percent on our shadows but our highlights is what's really killing this image. I really want to dial that back to about 16. Let's increase the luminance of that just a little bit keeping an eye on our histogram up here. Let's bring the luminance of our mid-tones up and the luminance of our shadows down. Now that's a really interesting color combination that you can have here. Using our split complementary editing here. Let's decrease the blending and let's have it balanced more to the left. You can definitely see the distinct redness in our mid-tones, you can definitely see some of that green in our highlights, and you can see the blue in our shadows. Very nice. Let's look at the before and after. So completely different tone to our image. Perfect. Let's keep going and let's do a double slit complimentary. How are we going to do that with just three of these dials here? Let me show you. Let's keep going.
11. Double Split Complementary: Now we're really getting to the real nitty-gritty of color grading, some of the more unique and fine-tune calibrating options that are out there, some more unique color harmonies, and this one is going to deal with double split complementary. If you remember in the last video we did the split complementary and that was the opposite color of the color wheel, it splits off into two. But what is the double split complementary? Well, essentially it's going to split off on both sides. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's see that in action. Again, I've created more virtual copies, and I've decreased the size of the thumbnail so we can actually see everything that we're working with. Let's go ahead and select our new copy of model portrait. We have copy 5 now. Let's go over to our Develop tab. Now let's reset. You might be thinking, how are we going to use four colors when we only have three different dials here? Well, we have a global color adjustment that we can do. That's what we're going to do at the end as our fourth overarching color. Let's go ahead and look at our colors here that we can do for a double split complementary. Let's start with a nice color for our shadows. I'm going to go with a nice type of light blue cyan type of color. Not bad. If we split off from here, either side we're going to have a cyan, and we're going to have a deeper blue. Now if we go across to get the complementary color, we're going to have an orange. If we split off from there, we're going to have a yellow-orange, and we're going to have a red, almost a magenta. So those are the colors we're working with. We're working with a red magenta, we're working with a yellow, we're working with a cyan, and a deep blue. Those are the four colors we're going to work with. Let's go ahead and do that. For our highlights, I'm going to bring in a little bit of that yellow. I like that. For our mid-tones, let's go ahead and bring in some of that red. I see that looks very bad. I will fix it, don't you worry. But now we also need our overarching color, which is going to be a deeper blue, or it could be a cyan. Let's take a look. For the overarching color, let's just double-check the color we have. We have hue of 206. If we type in 206, let's do 100 percent. This is a color we're working with for our shadows, but we need to split off from here. So we have our option to go over here or over here. Now I'm actually going to do a global adjustment favoring the cyan. Let's go ahead and make this look good. Let's go ahead for our shadows. Let's decrease the saturation here. It's got about 39. Highlights, we can bring that down as well to about 50. Mid-tones are very intense in this particular image, and we can also reduce the global. Very nice. I'm going to bring the luminance up globally to about 43. Now let's look at all three of these and see what we can do with the luminance and blending and balance here. I feel like for the shadows, I might want to bring it up ever so slightly. Very nice. I like that. The highlights and mid-tones I might keep. I might bring the mid-tones of just a touch. Not too much because I don't want to keep this a little bit more moody. Very nice. As for the blending, I definitely want us to blend a little more, so let's go even up to 70 for that. For the balance, I'm actually going to keep this centered at zero. Very nice. Let's look at the before and after. Before, and after. We've completely changed this image. But I can indistinctly see this blue color in the shadow. You can see the overarching cyan color that we've added. You can see the red in her mid-tones, and you can see this yellow in her highlights. So you see, we can really use this very effectively. Now let's go over to our grunge photo. We have our grunge photo, let's go ahead and reset this. We're going to do a very similar thing. But this time, we're going to do things with some different colors. For the shadows, let's start out and have this be a deep red-orange. Now, if we want to come across here for the complement for reaching this cyan light blue color, if we split off from there, we can go anywhere in the cyan green range, or we can go down here into our deep blues. For our highlights, let's actually bring our highlights down into the deep blues. Let's bring our mid-tones over into our cyan. Very nice. For overarching, we're going to give it an overarching yellow tone. But let's make sure we have the right color. This is hue of 14. If we do hue of 14, saturation, 100, we want to split off from this. I might do an overall adjustment to favor more of this type of tone. Now, this looks horrendous, doesn't it? I agree with you, 100 percent. Let's bring the global adjustment down. We can come back to this later, but let's look at our shadows, our highlights, our mid-tones, and let's see what our problem areas are. First of all, this red-orange in our shadow is way, way too much. Let's bring the saturation of that down. Very nice. Let's bring our mid-tones saturation down. You see we're slowly bringing our image back to where it should be, and let's bring the saturation of our highlights down. Not bad. I might want to increase the luminance of our shadows. Very nice. I'm going to increase the luminance of our shadows ever so slightly. We are pushing the clipping here; you can see a little bit on her shoe there. In fact, let's decrease that. You can always go back here and just reduce the highlights if you would like. But since we're working exclusively in the Color Grading tab, let's do that. Not bad. For our mid-tones, let's go ahead, bring that down, increase the contrast with that in our image. As you see, we have a really interesting color combination in this particular image. It's warm but it's cool but what is it? It is a double split complementary. Let's go ahead and let's look at the before and after. Before, and after. You can really see that we've added the cyan green color into our mid-tones. We have blue in our highlights. You can see that. You can see this green orange. You can see this red-orange and our shadows very much so. I might even decrease that just a little bit, and you can see the overarching global adjustment of the red. But let's go ahead and adjust these blending and balance just a little bit. Let's bring the blending down actually to about 40, and I'm going to leave the balance. There we go. But let's apply the same color harmony to our landscape that we've been working with. Let's reset this, and again, let's pick a nice color for our shadows. I'm going to go different this time. I'm going to go for a green in our shadows. Now that hurts my eyes. Doesn't it hurt yours? Yeah, it does. But let's go ahead and try and get a nice edit out of this. If we go complementary here and split off, we're going to have a nice purple color here and we're going to have a deep red. So let's go ahead and add a red to our mid-tones, and let's add a purple to our highlights. We're going to do an overarching global adjustment of cyan. I'm going to reduce the opacity of our cyan, saturation down to just 30, and let's go ahead and fix this horrendous edit that we've just made. Let's bring the saturation down of our green very low to about 34 and I do want to darken that down. Not bad. Let's bring down the saturation of our mid-tone red color that we've added. Again, if you hold down Shift, that will make sure you don't change your color from the luminance up. Let's bring the saturation of our highlights down just a little bit, and we can increase the luminance there. You see we are clipping a little bit for some of the colors. So I might want to bring down a little bit of that. That's not too bad. I'm going to keep that as it is. I might even desaturate this green just a little more. Not bad. As for the blending, we can have the blend be even more, which I will, I'll have it be about 84, and I might want to balance it to the green side of this. Let's bring out the green in this image. So if we talk of the before and after, we've really added a punch to this image. We've made it more vibrant using this color harmony, which is really cool. I like that. Next, we're going to move on to the square color harmony.
12. Square: We're almost at the end of our different color harmonies. But the second class that we're going to touch on right now is, the square color harmony. If you remember on the color wheel, this essentially creates a square or a plus of colors that you're going to use in your color wheel. Let's go ahead and let's see that in action. Let's go to our model over here, model portrait, and let's go into our Develop tab. As before, we're going to reset this image to original, but again, this is using four colors. We're going to do is very similar to the previous one where we are going to use our fourth color as our overarching global color green. Now, I want to do something a little bit different. I want to create a more V pastel kind of edit to this portrait. Let's try and do that, shall we? For our shadows here, let's go ahead and choose a nice pink color, the pink purple. Here we go. I'm going to do the four cardinal directions here. We are going to purple first shadows for our highlights. I'm going to have our highlights be a red. I'm going to have our mid tones be a green. Now, I'm going to have an overarching tone of cyan. Let's turn our overarching saturation down. I'll probably come back to that later, but for now, let's look at our mid tones. There's a lot of green in here. I don't like it. Let's go ahead, bring the saturation of that down. Let's bring the luminance of that up. Pretty nice. Let's bring the saturation of our purple down and the luminous up. Very nice. Slowly getting to that pastel look. Let's bring the saturation down of our red here, and again the luminance up. That's when the luminance is up to about 63 not bad, let's go to our global. I want to just luminance globally. Let's bring the brightness up. This is going to be a brighter, happier edit. Let's go ahead and do that, then let's see how we want our blending imbalance to go. I do want to increase the blending to about 67. As for the balance, let's balance the slightly off to the left by about minus eight. Very nice. We've really made this be more of a pastel pink wash image. That's the color green that we've applied. Let's turn off the color grading. This is a before, and after. This is a substantial change and very much needed. You can still see some of the green in the mid tones here. You can see all the colors that we use in the square color harmony. Perfect. Let's go to our grunge photo shoot. Let's reset that. I'm going to use another plus. This time I'm going to do almost an X edit over our color wheel. For our shadows, we're going to use the steep blue. For a highlight, I'm going to use a direct opposite, I'm going to use this yellow. For mid tones, I'm going to use a magenta. Globally, I'm going to apply a green. Let's go ahead and bring that down, our global green. It's going to add just a little bit of minting color over everything. But we don't really see that right now do we? Let's bring our mid tones down because there's a lot of mid tones and shadows in this particular image. Spin the luminance of that up as well. Very nice. Let's bring all the saturation down. For our highlights, let's bring that to about 54. Increase luminance as well. As for our shadows, let's bring that down to about 50 percent is current where we want to be with that. Then we can bring the luminance of that down or up. Let's bring that up just a little bit. Very nice. As for the luminance of the highlights, let's bring that down. I'm keeping an eye on my histogram on top here again, now banned. As for the blending, let's blend this more to get it to about 74, and that's for the balance. Actually, I like the balance of it being in the middle, and I think that looks the best for this particular image. Let's get the before and after. This really created a very nice grunge type of edit using four different colors, very nice. If you find that you don't see one of these colors well enough, simply just increase the saturation. You see we brought a little bit more of that into our image. We just increase the saturation ever so slightly and we have more of that magenta color in our mid tones. I'm going to bring that down. Saturation is around 40. I think that looks better. Very nice. Let's move on to our landscape. Lovely. Let's reset this. Again, I want to do another plus type of edit here, so it's a square. Let's go ahead. For our shadows, let's choose something that we've not done yet. Let's go for a nice yellow and eye shadows. Well, let's see what other column might work. I'm actually going to go with what I think will look good. Let's go with a nice deep blue. Opposite of that, we have a yellow, then we have some cyan and then we have some magenta to work with. Let's go add some yellow to our highlights. Very nice. To our mid tones, let's go ahead and add a nice cyan color. Globally, this time we're going to add our magenta. Let's reduce that for now. You see what we're working with. Then go ahead and reduce the saturation of everything. We have something nicer to work with. That's when the luminance of our shadows down. Very nice. You can really use a luminance to create a lot of contrast in your images. That's for the highlights. Wandering the luminance up ever so slightly up to about plus 20. For the mid tones, let's bring that up, just about 37. Very nice. As for the global color here, let's keep that wireless saturation of 42. Global luminance we can have that be about 38. Again, you can see all the colors in this image. You can see this magenta color dotted about here, and you can see the blue and the shadows. You can see the green cyan in the mid tone is very much and you can see the yellow in our highlights, which is fantastic. It's exactly what we want. Let's see how we want to blend this. I want to have increased blending. Let's do 77. That's for the balance. Let's have it be balanced more. To the shadow side here, let's go to minus 35. Again, before and after, we've really created a cooler, more dramatic type of look to this again. Very nice. Let's move on to our very last color harmony, and that is, the compound.
13. Compound: You've made it to the very last color harmony, and that is compound. Now, if you remember when I talked about this, this color harmony is essentially using a complementary color harmony, except using the split off from that, but only of one particular side. Now, this is easier to show you than to explain. So let's go ahead and do that. Again, I've made one more set of copies. This is our eighth version that we're doing here. If you're following along, you should also have eight versions of your images here. Let's go ahead and click our first one here. Let's click Develop. We're going to reset and we're going to have a fresh image to work with. If you remember, I did say the compound looks like a K in our color wheel. Let me get a bigger color wheel here. What that means is, you can have a color up here, down here and then it's off in a K shape. It's split off from the complementary color in a K shape. That is essentially what the compound color harmony is. Now let's go ahead and apply that to this image. Let's look at this. For the shadows, let's go ahead, I want to add a nice deep blue to our shadows. Okay. Let's just think here. If we want this to be a compound, we're going to go opposite, we're going going to split off slightly and we're going to have an orange here. Let's say I want to have that be part of the highlight. So opposite, split off ever so slightly. But now for the mid tones, we have that same blue we have in our shadows, but I want to split it off to the same side. Keep that in mind, I'm not going to go splitting off to the other side, nor am I going to go up here and split off to the left side. This is on the same side and essentially going off to one side. I'm going to add a little bit of a purple color to our mid tones. We do have essentially a k here, here, here, here. But let's go ahead and do a global color adjustment, where this is going to be more of a yellow. We do have our k, essentially, of our compound color harmony. Let's go ahead and reduce the saturation. We're going to go through all the same steps that we've done, except for a different color harmony this time. Let's go ahead, reduce the saturation of everything that we have here. Perfect, now we can really get to work. Let's increase the luminance of our shadows, want to have a nice washed out look here. Lovely. Now for our mid tones, I want to keep that desaturated as much as possible and increase the luminance of that too, so I get some of the detail back in her face, which is what I want. That's for the highlights. I'm going to go ahead and keep the saturation in the middle for that. I might increase the luminance of that as well. Not bad. Now for the global, we have our yellow here, and you can see what happens if we increase and decrease the saturation of that. So be very careful with what you do. I'm going to hold down shift so I make sure I don't change my color. I'm going to have that be fairly low saturation, about 24. Let's have a saturation B about 36, and as for the luminance of that, let's bring that up globally on the yellow to about 55. Now if you pay attention, we have yellow globally over this, we have a blue in the shadows, which you can see, we have a purple in our mid tones, which you can very clearly see, and we have an orange in our highlights. This is a compound color harmony. It's combining a few of the different aspects of previous harmonies that we've learned. Very nice. Let's look at the before and after. That's a very dramatic edit. Let's go over to our grunge and essentially do the same thing. Let's reset this. So we have our original image to work with. Nice. This time, let's go ahead and let's add a purple to our shadow. Lovely. Then let's go ahead, for our mid tones, let's go and add a split off from the top into essentially an orange. Highlights, I want to be this limey yellow color, which means our global adjustment will be a magenta. You're following me here? This is essentially another K symbol. We have one here for our shadows. Shadows, opposite of that, straight across is essentially going to be our highlights, which is this lime yellow. Split off from that essentially a little bit, is going to be this orange for our mid tones, and split off from our shadow color, is this color here for our global adjustment. I'm going to go ahead and reduce the saturation of everything. That's when the saturation of the mid toned down, saturation of our shadows down, saturation of our highlights down. Very nice. Now we have something better to work with. Let's go ahead and increase the saturation over shadows, increase the luminance just a little bit and you really do have to play around with these to make sure you're getting the exact type of color and edit that you are hoping for. The compound color harmony is one that I personally don't use that often because it's not my particular style, I don't like personally to do all of this. I like to keep it simple. I personally use monochromatic or complementary most of the time, sometimes triad as well. Let's continue with our global adjustment, bring that down, let's globally increase our luminance. Very nice. We've created almost a pastel look to this image. Very cool. Let's look at our blending and balance. Let's increase the blending just a little bit to about 62, and as for the balance, I'm going to reduce it just by minus three. Not bad. Let's look at the before and after. We've color rated this to be more pastel, pinkish, purplish. You can always reduce that, just take down the saturation of your different colors. Lovely. It's not as in your face with that. Lovely. Let's look at the before and after of this. Perfect. Let's finish up with our landscape. Let's reset. Let's do the same thing. This time, I do want to get a nice cyan into my shadows. I'm going to go the opposite way, I'm going to go and split off to the left side of our compliment. Complementary to this would be this red-orange color. I feel like I want to add that to my mid tone sierra, okay. Which means to my highlights, I'm going to add this , orange yellow that split off from this, which means to my overarching color, for a global color grade, we're going to add a nice cyan type of color. Very nice, might even bring that down. Because you don't have to be split off too much, you can be split off just a little bit. So I'm going to bring that saturation down, bring the saturation of everything down. Perfect. Let's go ahead and saturation of this all the way. I want the highlights to be just 26, mid tones, keep that very low, about 20. Shadows, I'm altering the luminance down of the shadows, have a nice contrasting type of look to this image. Not bad. As for the global color grade, let's increase the luminance of the cyan. Lovely, but I do want to decrease the saturation. I feel like it's a little bit too much. Not bad. Then it's a matter of going back and forth between these, making sure you have exactly what you're hoping for. Let's bring the luminance down of our mid tones, and let's bring that down. Let's run our shadows up a little bit. Our highlights, we can essentially keep where they are. I'm just being wary of our red clipping, but you don't really see it. If you hover over this, it'll show you where it's clipping, but it's not showing that to us anywhere here. Perfect. Let's look at our blending and our balance. So as for the blending, I'm going to want this to be ever so slightly to the right here, let's bring that to 61. For the balance, let's balance this ever so slightly to the right this time, to about 10. Very nice. Let's look at the before and after, before and after, before and after. Very nice. We've added a lot of green into this. Surprisingly, it's really enhanced the green of our image and we didn't really add that much green to it at all. We added some of the cyan and we added some yellow, and together that brought out the green. That's just how color works. Lovely. Let's take a look at all of these images that we've done. Let's hop over to our library and look at all the different edits we've made using eight different color harmonies and eight different ways of color grading. It's crazy. Let's double-click this and let's go through each eight of these images. This was our analogous color edit. Then we have our monochromatic, was a completely different look. Then we had our triad. We had our complementary, we had our split complementary, we had our double split complementary, we had our square and we had our compound. So you're going to find what you like the best. Personally, I see in this set of images, you can look at just the thumbnails here, I personally really like the complementary colors, I like the split complementary, those turned out really nicely. But let's take a look at this grunge photo, because this has quite a few different color tones that we were able to achieve here with our color grading. This again, was our analogous, then we had monochromatic. Then we had our triad, then we had our complementary, we had our split complementary, we had our double split complementary, we had our square and we had our compound. My personal favorite is probably the square. Let's see. I also really actually liked how our fourth one came out, which was the complementary. So square and complementary really turned out very nice for this grunge edit. Now, let's take a look at our landscape images. This was the first one, our analogous. Then we had our monochromatic, then we had our triad, we had our complementary, we had our split complementary, Double Split Complementary, we had our square and our compound. Now, as you see some of these have varying degrees of success and some work better for certain types of photos over others. For me personally, for this landscape set of images, I really liked our square edit, our square color harmony. I actually also really liked the second one that we did on monochromatic and made it a lot warmer, which I really liked, was fantastic. Now what if you want to save these to have for the future and you want to have these as presets that you can then apply. For example, let's say I really like having the complementary color harmony and I want to be able to apply that to future edits. What am I going to do? It's very simple. We're going to create presets. In the next video, I'm quickly going to show you how you can save these edits as presets. Let's hop into that.
14. Presets: We've finished all of our edits. We've done a crazy amount of edits today, but what if you want to save these as presets that you can then apply in future edits? For example, I personally really liked how this edit turned out, this being the complimentary edit that we did on our model portrait. What if I want to save this as a preset that I then apply to future images? It's very simple. Let's click this image, let's go to our Develop tab, and here we see the edit that we made. We see the color grading that we applied to this and we see on the left here this tab that says Presets. If you click the drop-down you'll see some that come with Lightroom, and you can have a bunch of other ones that I already have here. This is my preset pack, which by the way if you want, you can get over on my website at www.therealtomkai.com/presets. It's cheaper than a cup of coffee and you can get a set of 10 presets that I've already made for you, that you can use on your images. But let's get back to the matter at hand. What if we want to save this edit as a preset? It's incredibly simple. Let's go ahead. All you need to do is click this plus, and you're going to do Create Preset. This dialog box is going to come up and it's going to ask you what you want to actually save into this preset. You have the Treatment & Profile, the White Balance Basic Tone. Anything that you do on the right-hand side here, it can save it into that preset. As you see here, we have color grading check that's essential. That's essentially what we're doing here, we didn't change anything else. I'm going to make sure we have color grading and let's name this something like complimentary color harmony. Just let me know what we're doing here. You can save this to different groups. You can create a new group. I'm just going to save it to User Presets, and all you're going to do is click "Create". You're wondering what happens now. Well, if we scroll down, let me just close this, we have User Presets. If you scroll down in here, you should see complimentary color harmony. This is going to be sorted alphabetically, so make sure you're aware of that. If you're looking for this, it's not going to be just at the top or at the bottom. It might be, if that's how it is alphabetically, but this one happens to be here. Essentially, if I have my raw image, let's just click "Reset", and I want to create a complementary color harmony to that, I can just click that and boom, it's applied. Then I can go ahead and tweak all of these settings later on. I can bring this up here, bring this down here, and still keep the complimentary edit, but with different colors. It's very adjustable and it's really great to have a preset that you can work with like this. You can create many different looks and you can do that for every single color harmony that we went through today. Essentially, you can have eight presets ready to go just from this course today. How awesome. In the next video, I'm going to go over your assignment for this course because I don't want you to just go through this course, I want to see what you've done using this course. Let's keep going.
15. Your Assignment: Now, we've gone to the really fun part of the course and that is where you come in. This is where I'm going to tell you what your assignment is. That's right, I want you to create all of these different color harmonies that we've gone through and color-grade your own image. Now you may notice that I have another row of images here. What's that? Well, I did the assignment myself. I did all of these color harmonies for this one photo. Let's take a look at them. Some are a hit and miss, and let me show you. This is the analogous color harmony for this image. Then we have the monochromatic, which looks better, I'm not too upset at that. Then we have the triad, which looks very nice. Then we have the complementary colors, which is my personal favorite. As you can see, I went with the cyan orange color combo there, which is my personal favorite. Then we have split complementary, which also looks very nice. Then we have double split complementary, which gave a pretty interesting result. Then we have our square color harmony and our compound color harmony. This is essentially what I want you to do, I want you to take your own photo and do these edits. Do the color grading, every single one of these eight, that we went through today and apply them to your own images. It's fine if it's a hit and miss, try and make it look as good as possible. Let's see what you have, let's see what you've got. Get creative, have fun with this, and drop it down to the students submitted project section of the course. I'm really interested to see what you can do. In the next video, I'm going to wrap things up for this course and give you some of my final thoughts.
16. Final Thoughts: There you have it. You've made it through my course, Adobe Lightroom Classic 2021: How to Color Grade Your Photos. I'll think you've learned a lot today; proper ways to color grade, different color harmonies, what colors mean, and why we need to be aware of the emotion of color. As I said in the previous video, I want you to take the assignment and have fun with it. I want to see how you can color grade an image. I would like to mention that I am selling Lightroom presets right now for special introductory price over on my website. So head over to www.therealtomkai.com/presets to get your presets today. These are perfect to use in Lightroom to apply a preset color grade to your images that I've already made and tested over many years of practice and use. I made all of these myself and I'm really excited to share them with you guys. Not only that, they're cheaper than a cup of coffee. So check it out. If you've enjoyed this course, I encourage you to leave a review and rating as that helps me out a lot and feel free to check out my teacher page to check out other Lightroom and Photoshop courses that I've made, ranging from beginner courses all the way to mastery level courses. It's been a pleasure teaching you today and I hope to see you again in a future course. Take it easy.