3 hours ago
8
Color grading gives you a quiet way to shift the mood of an image without wrecking it, and getting it wrong is how photos start looking fake. Two shots of the same bird, taken in different light, can end up looking like completely separate images unless you know how to steer the color.
Working through two photos of mourning doves shot in his backyard, Terry Vander Heiden walks through the color grading panel inside Lightroom Classic and shows how to make one image match another. One dove was shot in direct sun, the other under overcast light, so the color of the light differs even though the direction is the same. Vander Heiden makes virtual copies first, which lets him flip between before and after and experiment freely without touching the originals. He starts in the basic panel to knock down contrast, then moves into color grading to bring the tones closer together. The whole point is restraint, and he leans on that idea hard.
The color grading panel gives you three wheels for shadows, midtones, and highlights, plus a global option that changes everything at once. Vander Heiden prefers working each range individually, grabbing the dot in the midtone wheel and dragging toward blue to cool the image down. Holding the shift key locks the movement so you only change saturation and not hue, which stops the cursor from swinging the color all over the place. Clicking the small triangle reveals separate hue, saturation, and luminance sliders, and the luminance control there only affects the brightness of that specific color rather than the whole frame. He pushes blue into the shadows, adds a touch of magenta to the highlights, then hops back to the basic panel to layer in a little yellow and green until the two doves read as siblings.
Then he hits a wall. Color grading in Lightroom Classic is global, so warming up the bird also warms the trees and the wood behind it. Vander Heiden shows the fix. The short version: masking and color grading don't live together in Lightroom Classic right now, so he moves the file into Photoshop, converts it for smart filters, and opens the Camera Raw filter. Inside Camera Raw, you can mask an object and color grade only that selection, which is the control Lightroom Classic doesn't hand you yet.
That split between Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw is worth understanding on its own terms. The two programs share the same processing engine, which is why the sliders look and behave identically once you're inside the Camera Raw filter. Adobe tends to roll features into Camera Raw first, and features often migrate over to Lightroom Classic later. If a tool you want isn't in Lightroom Classic, checking whether Camera Raw already has it is a habit that pays off, and the round trip through Photoshop costs you little because your muscle memory carries straight over.
His warning about oversaturation is the part worth sitting with. Push color too far and viewers start asking whether an image is AI-generated, which is a strange new problem for a real photograph to have. Subtle grading keeps a photo believable while still nudging the mood the way you want. Blue in the shadows to make them recede, warmth in the highlights to pull them forward, small saturation moves rather than big ones. These are the same principles colorists use in film, scaled down to a bird on a fence. Watch the video above to see how Vander Heiden masks the bird and grades it separately inside Camera Raw.
English (US) ·