Lightroom Tools That Make Color Grading Easy

Inside of Lightroom Classic, there is a tool called Color Grading. It’s a great tool and super useful. I use it a lot. It separates color adjustments based on tonal range, so you can separately make adjustments to Highlights, Midtones and Shadows. You might be surprised at just how useful and powerful this really is in image editing. Each tonal selection allows you to adjust Hue, Saturation and Luminance, so as you can probably imagine you can have quite an impact on an image.

However, outside of Lightroom, the term color grading refers to adjusting colors in your image to create a mood. So you can use the Color Grading tool in Lightroom to color grade your image. You can see how this may get confusing for someone that is new to this stuff.

I find that using the Color Grading tool by itself is often not enough to finish the color grading in an image, so I tend to stack other color editing tools with it, for ultimate control and the most powerful results. These include Point Color and (especially) Calibration. In this demo video, I walk through a full edit showing how I use a few tools to get the color grade on this sunset just right. Follow along and enjoy!