Make the grade

Colour grading is a hot topic in photo editing, and a great way to enhance the mood of your images. James Paterson gets you up to speed

- James Paterson

Colour grading is something we associate with video editing, but as the boundaries between video and stills - as well as photographers and videographers - become increasingly blurred, it's a technique that is ever more relevant to photographers. But what exactly is colour grading? And what tools and apps do we need to carry it out? Over the next few pages we'll explore some of the key techniques for colour grading in Lightroom and Photoshop, and show you how to create classic colour grading looks.

Photo editing can be divided into two broad stages. First is the correction stage, where we fix white balance, fine-tune exposure, crop and make other tweaks. Then comes the creative stage, where we create an atmosphere. This is where colour grading can be so effective. It's a great mood enhancer, whether we want to give our photos a warm, sunny vibe, a cold sombre feeling, or a retro makeover. By mapping colours onto the highlights, mid-tones or shadows, we can take our images in all kinds of interesting directions.

Lightroom colour grading

The best place to begin colour grading in Lightroom is - no surprise - the Colour Grading panel. A replacement to the old Split Toning panel, this invites you to add colour tints to the shadows, mid tones and highlights in your photos (of course, you don't necessarily have to tint all three). As with most photo edits, you're better off starting with a raw file than a JPEG as there's more colour information to work with, and therefore greater headroom for editing. What's more, with raws you can set a white balance after the fact with exactly the same results as if you'd done so before taking the shot, which gives you greater freedom both for correcting colour casts and introducing creative colour shifts.

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