Project five: Adobe CC - Colour grading explained

James Paterson demonstrates how to get to grips with this powerful tinting tool in Photoshop’s Camera Raw

- James Paterson

The recently introduced Color Grading panel is available in Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin and Lightroom, and it’s one of the most powerful toning tools on offer. Several of the other colour tools in Camera Raw are geared towards correcting unwanted colour shifts, but Color Grading is different. Rather than correcting, it instead invites you to add colour shifts of your own in order to give an image a certain look or mood. As such, Color Grading is one of the best tools for boosting the atmosphere of a scene.

Color Grading is a replacement for the old Split Toning panel and, like its predecessor, it lets you add individual colour tints to different parts of the tonal range of your image based on brightness values. But while the Split Toning panel only allowed for two colour tints, with Color Grading we instead choose three. So as well as tinting shadows and highlights, we can also shift colours in the midtones (of course, if you’d rather use two colours then you can just leave the midtones untouched). Alongside the three intuitive colour wheels in the Color Grading panel, you’ll also find a Global wheel that makes it easy to add a single colour shift. What’s more, if we delve into each individual colour wheel, we’ll find further options for tweaking the colours and shifting the balance between them.