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We have tested lightroom’s new color grading tool – here is what we think

In Lightroom’s newest iteration, Adobe has replaced the split toning tool with a brand new color grading tool. It is not only videographers who will benefit from a new and powerful color grading tool; it’s helpful for photographers. Landscape photographers have, for example, extensively use split toning to warm up highlights and add colder tones to the shadows.

I want to share a brief explanation of the various options the tool offers + reveal some hidden panels. I’ll also look at how hotkeys provide full control of the center points and knobs outside the color circles.

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Watch: All you wanted to know about color theory and color grading

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Understanding color is one of the crucial things to understand, no matter if you’re a photographer or a video creator. Understanding color theory and psychology will help you add more meaning and impact to your work. So, if you’d like to master the use of color, Joanna Kustra has an amazing video for you.

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Colour in Cinema: Ad Astra – The Most Colourful Movie You Never Saw

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Have you seen Ad Astra? Do you remember it being one of the most colourful movies you’ve ever seen? No? Why not?

Many modern space films have been guilty of looking a little drab and desaturated, but can we blame them? Space, as far as many of us see it, is pretty colourless. It’s just a vast black void punctuated only by blindingly bright light. We don’t immediately associate that limitless void with bold, striking colours that exist between those two extremes. So how does a film about space inject colour into its scenes whilst still remaining somewhat realistic?

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How to create the Wakui cinematic look in Lightroom and Photoshop

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Applying a cinematic effect to your nighttime city photos is a popular way to turn them from snapshots into something special, like in the examples of Masashi Wakui. I’ve been following his work for years, and finally wanted to try and figure out how this effect is done, without using any plugins in Lightroom and Photoshop. The key parts of this technique are the crushed blacks, the glow in the highlights, and the colour toning.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to recreate this effect by hand in Lightroom and Photoshop, adding a cinematic look to the photo below. The basis of this technique is to use an extreme white balance that is then recovered by split-toning.

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This Color Wheels add on for Photoshop lets you color correct and grade photos as easily as video

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Colour wheels in applications like Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve are an absolute blessing when it comes to both colour correcting or colour grading video. It’s a feature that I’ve wished image editing applications like Photoshop had for years. Now, finally, a new Colour Wheels plugin from the folks at Retouching Toolkit gives them to you!

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Two simple ways to copy the color grade from one image to another

Color grading is a great way to change the mood of your images, and there is more than one way to do it. But other than doing it from scratch, you can copy the color grading of an image you particularly like, and add the same mood to your shots. In this video, Ted Forbes will teach you two simple methods for copying the color grade from one image to another, and you can apply it to any photo you like.

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Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 16 now comes with “Content-aware Fill” style features for video

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The big news lately from the Adobe camp is Content-aware Fill for video in Adobe After Effects. But Adobe isn’t the only company who has been working on such a feature. Blackmagic’s latest DaVinci Resolve 16 Beta update also includes a similar feature, along with a slew of other major updates.

We spoke with Blackmagic at NAB 2019 to find out more about the new features that have come to DaVinci Resolve 16 Beta.

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Blackmagic has released 8 solid hours of video training for DaVinci Resolve

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If you’ve not yet discovered DaVinci Resolve, it’s essentially Blackmagic’s answer to Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audion all rolled into one – but with a way better colour correction system. Now, Blackmagic, the company behind Resolve, has just released 8 solid hours of video training to show you how to use it.

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How to colour grade your images with intent

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Colour grading tends to specifically refer to the colouring of video and in photography, we often refer to this as colour toning, but whatever you’re happier calling it, this process of making a conscious decision to apply a specific colour-look to an image in post-production is an incredibly powerful tool.

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Start your color grade with the Infinite Color Panel

 

The Infinite Color Panel has arrived and I have been pushing the create button ever since. The panel has been announced for quite some time and when it was close to being released you could feel the hype picking up on Facebook. The $129,- Photoshop extension looks deceptively simple, so why would you buy a big button?  

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