DIY Photography

Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time

  • News
  • Inspiration
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • DIY
  • Gear
Search

Submit A Story

How to reverse engineer colour grades in Photoshop and reproduce them with curves

Feb 7, 2018 by John Aldred 2 Comments

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Colour grading is such a complicated and in-depth topic. Sure, you can cheat and buy some preset pack from somewhere, but you gain so much more when you learn to understand colour and its nuances. Then you can create your own grades and get them just the way you want.

That’s the point of the Look Creation & Color Grading series from RAWexchange. The whole course is four hours of video training that covers digital colour theory and principles in both Capture One and Photoshop. It’s a paid course, but there is also this free bonus videos, which shows us how we can analyse and reverse engineer a colour grade, and then apply it to other images using curves adjustments.

The first step in the process is the trickiest. You’re basically going into colour correction mode. It’s finding a way to turn the graded image back into something that resembles what the original might have looked like. Photoshop has a number of auto correction tools that can help to do this, but they don’t offer much insight as to how they did it. You just click something, it fixes it, and you’re done. So, to reverse the process and be able to apply it to other images isn’t as simple.

You’ll still want to duplicate the image and apply various automatic corrections to it to see which gives you the most realistic looking result. Then, use the Threshold adjustment layer in order to determine exactly which are the brightest and darkest points in the image. After that, use the Colour Sampler to mark those highlight and shadow spots. This lets you constantly keep an eye on the RGB values of those areas as you change them.

When you enable your corrected layer, you can see what these highlight and shadow values are supposed to be to provide a more realistic and accurate original colour. So it’s time to add a curves adjustment and use that to alter the red, green and blue levels throughout your graded image to make it resemble the automatically corrected one. It helps to regularly toggle the autocorrected layer on and off so that you can compare.

With the curves adjustment created to turn the image from the graded version, creating a new curves adjustment to generate the grade is quite simple. It’s basically just a case of inverting all of the values along the curve. For this bit, you’ll really want to watch the video to fully understand what that means. But, essentially you’re creating a new curves adjustment which cancels out the one you just created. Basically giving you back the original grade.

This curves adjustment can then be saved out as a custom preset which you can then apply directly onto other images. All you need to do give another image the same grade is add a curves adjustment, load the curves preset, and you’re done.

You could even save the curves preset out as a LUT file and use it to grade video footage in Premiere Pro. After Effects or other application.

A few more images are demonstrated in the video using the same process, with some trips for getting around certain issues that may pop up. It’s well worth a way if you’ve been trying to figure out how a certain grade was created, or how to replicate it yourself.

And if you’re interested in checking out the whole course, you can do so over at RAWexchange, and it currently appears to be on sale.

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Related posts:

How to create quick and easy cinematic colour grades in Photoshop in 2 minutes Default ThumbnailReverse Engineer This Light Default ThumbnailReverse Engineer This Light – Resolved The Infinite Looks Photoshop plugin gives you a million different grades for your images

Filed Under: Tutorials Tagged With: Adobe Photoshop, color grading, curves, grading

About John Aldred

John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.

« Here are some photos and videos from the SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch
Sigma rumoured to expand their pro zoom range with new 14-24mm f/2.8DG HSM Art lens »

Submit A Story

Get our FREE Lighting Book

DIYP lighting book cover

* download requires newsletter signup
DIYPhotography

Recent Comments

Free Resources

Advanced lighting book

Recent Posts

  • How I shot abstract light orbs with a 360 camera and camera rotation
  • Color theory, RAW files, and RAW developers
  • Freewell K2 is yet another magnetic filter holder system
  • Apply to this Maldives resort to ‘win’ a 3 week job as Honeymoon photographer
  • Reviving a Legend: Repairing a Mamiya RB67

Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe

Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.

Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.

Copyright © DIYPhotography 2006 - 2023 | About | Contact | Advertise | Write for DIYP | Full Disclosure | Privacy Policy