From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

959 Color grading in Camera Raw

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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959 Color grading in Camera Raw

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today, we'll be talking about a recent edition to both Camera Raw and Lightroom called color grading. Now, four things you need to know about color grading. First, it replaces split toning which let you colorize highlights independently of shadows. Second, in addition to highlights and shadows, color grading lets you assign color to mid-tones. Third, color grading is backward compatible. So it preserves any split toning you may have applied in the past. Fourth, and I think you'll get a kick out of this one, color grading was originally a development lab term in which a Hazeltine film analyzer, seriously, who cares? That's what Wikipedia is for. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. And so here I am looking at a handful of RAW DNG files inside Adobe Bridge. And just by way of a quick preview, I'll tap the space bar in order to switch to the full screen mode. Here's the original version of the photo. Here's how it might look if we were to altogether replace the natural colors using color grading. And here's the effect of color grading combined with those natural colors. All right, so I'll go and switch over to the original image and I'll tap the R key in order to open Camera Raw hosted inside Bridge. And notice that I've applied a few basic settings in advance. So, I've cranked up the exposure value, I've also taken up the clarity and so forth. And so you want to start things off by applying your desired development settings. And now just to make things as obvious as possible, I'll scroll up till I can see my edit options, and I'll click in the B&W button in order to convert the image to black and white. Now, I'll go ahead and click on what Adobe calls the disclosure triangle, in front of the word basic. I call it the twirly triangle because it allows you to twirl things open. And so, I'll go ahead and click on the triangle in front of color grading and by default, you're going to see these three color wheels, one each for mid-tones, shadows, and highlights. And that's a function of clicking on this three-way icon right here. All right, just so we can compare color grading to the old split toning feature, I'll drag this circle at the center of the shadows wheel to whatever location. I'll go ahead and take it to let's say the shade of blue right here, and that infuses colors into the shadows. That is the darkest luminous levels inside the image. And now, I'll go ahead and drag the circle inside the highlights wheel in order to infuse the highlights that is the brightest luminous levels with this pale shade of orange. And so that's how split toning used to work, very simple which is why color grading is able to preserve any split toning that you've applied to legacy images but it gets much better. We also have this mid-tones wheel right here which allows you to infuse colors into the mid-tones like so. And so in my case, I've independently colorized the mid-tones with green. Now that's a little bit much in my opinion. And so I'm going to modify a few settings for starters I'm going to change the highlights. And so notice this outer circle which for me appears orange. If I drag it, then I'm going to modify the hues as indicated by this H value right here independently of the saturation and luminous value which we'll come to in a second. But I'm just going to go ahead and take the hue value to approximately 210, if you're following along with me. Now we've got too much saturation. And so notice if I drag this internal circle this guy right here toward the center I'm going to reduce the saturation value. And I also get a soft constraint. So you can see that gray line that's constraining my saturation so that I'm not effecting the hue value. If I were to drag this guy a little more radically then I would modify the hue and saturation values at the same time, that's not what I want. So I'll press control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo that change. So I have a huge value of 210 and a saturation of 50 where the highlights are concerned. Now I'm going to drag this outer circle for the shadows until I achieve a hue value of 270. And then I'll drag this internal circle right here until I have a saturation of 80. Works out nicely. And as you can see I am once again, getting that soft constraint. And if you're working along with me you will feel it as well. All right now I'm going to take the hues where the mid-tones are concerned to 50. And then I'll go ahead and drag this internal circle to a saturation value of 50 right here. All right, now I want to draw your attention to this luminous slider, starting with the shadows. And so notice this histogram right here in the top right corner of the screen it's pretty nicely flashed out. I want you to see what's happening to the shadows over here on the left-hand side. If I crank up this luminous value, which is represented by L right here, notice that I've gotten rid of a bunch of blacks and I've smoooshed the shadows as well. Whereas if I take this value down, I'm going to end up clipping the blacks, not desirable at all. So even though this luminous value is here, just in case you need it, you probably don't want to make big modifications where the shadows and the highlights are concerned. Whereas for the mid-tones, it's going to behave like a kind of gamma adjustment where you either work with the levels adjustment layer. And so I might take that up ever so slightly to 12 in my case. All right and finally, we've got this guy right here, global. And if you click on it, you're going to see one big color wheel that is going to affect the shadows, the mid-tones and the highlights as we're seeing right here. So this is a big overall colorization. I want something much more subtle. So I'll drag this outer circle until I have a hue value as you're seeing below the wheel of 100 and then I'll drag this internal circle down. And it's pretty obvious at this point that I have that soft constraint until I see a saturation value of 20. All right, now I'm going to scroll down a little bit so that I can see this affects option right here. I'll go ahead and twirl it open and I'll click inside the vignetting value and take it up perhaps, if I want a greeting card effect, which I don't. So I'll take it down to negative 20. So I'm ever so slightly burning those edges. And now I want you to see the difference between having B&W turned on versus off. And so notice if I were to click on this figure right here in order to zoom it in by default to 100% that I have completely overrode the colors. Whereas if I were to turn that black and white button off I will restore some of the original colors like so. But I want you to see that we have achieved a high degree of colorization as well, and you can compare the effect by clicking and holding on the eyeball icon right here associated with color grading. So you click and hold. That's going to temporarily turn the effect off. And then if you release that's going to turn the effect back on and just so we can see it apply to the entire image. I'll go ahead and click to zoom out and then I'll click and hold on that eye for color grading. This is the original version of the image albeit subject to that negative vignetting value down there in the bottom right corner of the screen. And if I were to release this is the final color modified effect. Thanks to these three way color grading options that are available to me in Camera Raw 13 and later. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a follow-up movie in which I treat you to some color grading, tips and tricks. Gosh, they're awesome. If you're looking forward to next week, that's when I show you how to use two more color grading options, blending and balance. Oh, and by the way, this photo, January 2020 Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada. The evening before we got on this very boat still covered in snow, rode a few meters away from shore and went scuba diving. Some would argue, check your privilege. I would argue that I should have checked my brain. Deke's techniques each and every week. My brain aside keep watching.

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