Lightroom Color Tools: Key Differences Explained

If you are like me, you enjoy adjusting colors in your images when in Lightroom. The great news is of course that Lightroom has some amazing tools that help you do exactly this. And there are a lot of color tools in Lightroom. But there are three that I consider the major ones: Color Mixer, Color Grading, and Calibration.

Each are useful and powerful, but they are different and impact your images in different ways. Below is a full video demo of these tools, how they work, and how they differ as well.

But here is the simple explanation:

• Color Mixer - focused on color value or color channel. This is the old HSL with an upgrade which includes Point Color. This tool identifies colors and allows you to adjust their Hue, Saturation and Luminance. This is very useful and specifically Point Color lets you use an eyedropper to be very specific in choosing the color you want to adjust.

• Color Grading - focused on tonal areas in the image. This is the old Split Toning and divides the photo by tonal value: highlights, midtones and shadows. So you can select a Hue and Saturation level for any of the tonal areas.

• Calibration - focused on the colors in each pixel. This tool is amazing, and quickly became my favorite. It works on the Hue and Saturation of the RGB values (Red, Green, Blue) in each pixel. So you can increase the Blue Saturation slider here and it increase the saturation of the blue values in each pixel. It’s a great way to give your image a boost and is well worth experimenting with.

Check out the video below for a full demonstration of how these tools differ from one another. The bottom line is that you have three ways to attack color: via color channels, tonal areas, or pixels. It gives you so much control over color, especially when you stack these tools to really dial in your edits.

Hope this helps!