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Color Grading: Using Adobe Lightroom (CC) to Make an Image More Dynamic.

Normally, I spend my summer vacations chasing sunrises and sunsets down at the beach. I’ve been fortunate enough to see some really gorgeous scenes. But this past vacation, the weather was not on my side and the sunrises and sunsets were pretty dull. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t get any good pictures. In fact, if the colors are only needed for the background ambiance of a photo, a lot of that can be created using Adobe Lightroom.

Here’s a color grading tutorial under the cut on how to turn this image below into the one you see above as this post’s banner.

I’d like to start by saying this if my first written tutorial in a long time, so thank you for clicking over, but please be patient with me. I am not and do not claim to be a photography teacher, and this will not be a comprehensive tutorial. More like a few tips to point you in the right direction.

***LAST THING BEFORE WE BEGIN: please DO NOT STEAL any of the images used in this guide. They are copyrighted fully by myself, Jamie Kassa, and are not to be edited or reposted without my explicit permission. If I see people have stolen any of my photos used in this I will not be making any more posts like it. Please don’t spoil the fun. Thank you.

Okay! Thanks for sticking around and let’s get started!

Here is the original image and the specs from my camera:

As this is not a tutorial for how to take the photo, I won’t get into details about what was used or why these settings -- perhaps that can be something I go over in a different post some day if enough people show interest -- but if you already know a bit about photography and wanted to see them, here they are.

So that’s our starting point. Now, first thing to do with a photo once you take it into Lightroom is get the crop and rotation right. Here’s how I cropped mine:

I use a 5x4 crop most often for portrait length images since that’s Instagram’s limit. It’s a good idea to make the horizon as close to straight as possible, as you can see by the breakers behind the toy car. If your composition is a little off this can also be a good time to correctly apply the Rule of Two Thirds to align your subject, in this case the little car, to the spot on the image most visually appealing.

Also remember to click on the lens correction profile. With this, Lightroom will automatically correct for the natural distortion of your lens.

Now once the image is cropped and composed, you can do some basic editing to make the image begin to appear more vibrant with warm, sunrise colors. Make the color balance warmer and the tint pinker, adjust basic settings such as light and vibrance/saturation, curves, dehave, hues (HSL), and split toning.

Here’s how the image starts to look with basic edits:

(You’ll also notice I also added on to one of the light bokeh bubbles in the right corner of the frame by the car. This was done using the Spot Removal tool. Just an artistic choice because that part of the frame seemed somewhat empty to me at the time.)

Here’s a screenshot of some of my basic settings at this point in the edit:

And here’s the shot again with the addition of split toning and adjusting the tone curve:

But these are edits that effect the entire image. Remember that sunrises are dynamic and effect different parts of a scene unequally. Once you’ve set up the ground work, you can start doing more specific edits to certain parts of your shot.

To balance the image and draw the eye more towards the toy car, I chose to make it appear the sun was rising beyond the right edge of the frame. I started adding radial and graduated filters to make the upper right corner appear brighter, warmer, more vibrant, and more contrast-y than the rest of the image.

Keep in mind, this is done most realistically by applying edits to all areas of the frame; the parts you want the eye to be drawn to, and the parts of lesser interest. You’ll notice in the above picture that areas like the bottom left have been made darker and colder, and areas like the upper left has been somewhat desaturated.

The last things to do is the really minute and exact edits using the brush feature. I sometimes use dozens of brushes while editing my pictures, especially ones that require some element of digital imaging engineering such as this one. In this shot, I added clarity and upped sharpness to the car, made the whole car brighter and more saturated, brought out the details around the grill and tires, lowered the highlights around the windshield so it would be more visible, enhanced the car’s reflection on the wet sand under it, upped the blacks along the breakers to make the waves more visible, and used the temp/tint/and color overlay options to make a more steady transition from the warm to the cool areas of the frame.

To give you an idea, here are all the brush markers I had open by the end of this edit in Lightroom:

And, at last, here’s the final image:

I hope this little walk-through has been helpful, or at the very least interesting. Remember, these are just some of my methods when to comes to making an image more dynamic. There are hundreds of ways to edit a photo and dozens of ways to create each effect. There isn’t a right or wrong when it comes to how you edit or how you take the idea in your head and translate it to your canvas. The goal of this tutorial was not to tell you how to edit your photos. It was to show you that with the right tools at your disposal you can really do a lot to augment an image and a bum sunset should in no ways handicap you.

Always keep creating.

...Let me know if you found this insightful and would possibly like to see more in the future.

All the best, -Jamie

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