Learn what the Color Grading panel is, how to use it in Lightroom, and how it affects the highlights, shadows, and midtones of your photo. To join Speedy Photographer or watch my FREE training: https://www.speedyphotographer.com Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/kevinraposo https://instagram.com/speedyphotographer You can e-mail me at: kevin@speedyphotographer.com -- ** TRANSCRIPT ** Just like the split toning tools, the color grading tools are used to actually add new color to the picture in different exposure ranges, rather than just mixing the existing color. But the split toning tools were limited to adjusting the highlights and shadows, whereas the color grading tools allow you to adjust the highlights, shadows, and also the midtones with significantly greater control. This is different from the tone curve because it actually adds color to the picture instead of just mixing it, and because it allows you to target two colors in different exposure ranges at the same time. This can be hard to understand when you first start out, so let me use this gradient image to help explain. On the right side of the image, you can see our highlights, on the left side of the image, you can see our shadows, and in the middle, you can see our midtones. And the color wheels can be used to add color to each of those three segments. If I set my highlights to pink, my shadows to green, and my midtones to blue, I end up with a picture that looks like this. It corresponds with those areas I just mentioned: highlights, shadows, and midtones. Pretty simple, and pretty similar to split toning. Now, let me reset this back to normal and show you how to actually use the panel to make your adjustments. If we look specifically at the highlights, we can see there are three main controls: the outer circle, the inner circle, and a small slider below. The outer circle controls the hue. This is how you select the color you want to add to the picture. If I want to add blue to the highlights, I would spin this over to blue. But you can see that it does nothing – which is because I haven’t adjusted the inner circle, which controls saturation. If I drag the inner circle toward the outside edge of the color wheel, you can see the blue becomes increasingly stronger. Pretty simple. One important thing to keep in mind is that if you want to adjust your saturation without adjusting your hue, you’ll need to hold down SHIFT – otherwise, the hue will move with it and you’ll lose your color. Lastly, we have the small slider which controls luminance. This is especially handy when it comes to highlights and shadows. As you can see right now, even though I have my saturation on the color wheel cranked up to the maximum, there is still a white portion in the highlights that remains unaffected. And if I drag the luminance slider, I can actually increase or decrease the brightness of the highlights, causing that blue to become more or less visible. This becomes much more obvious if I actually reset all of my color adjustments, and just move the luminance slider for the highlights. You can easily see how it affects the gradient. One final note when it comes to controlling the color wheel: if you click the ‘eye’ icon just above the luminance slider, you can preview what the image looks like with the adjustments turned off. Moving on: at the bottom of the panel, I have a blending and a balance slider. The blending slider controls how much your shadows, midtones, and highlights are overlapping and spilling over into each other, which can create smoother transitions at 100 or harder transitions at 0. The balance slider will allow you to control which sections of the picture are treated as shadows, midtones, and highlights. If you drag it to the left, the shadows take priority and the colors shift in that direction. If you drag it to the right, the highlights take priority and the colors shift in that direction. -- ** TAGS ** HOW TO USE THE TONE CURVE in Lightroom,lightroom color grading,how to use color grading in lightroom,editing color grading,color grading tutorial,how to use the color grading panel,color grading in lightroom,color grading sliders,kevin raposo,lightroom,how to use lightroom,lightroom tutorials for beginners,lightroom tutorial editing,Hue Saturation Luminance,lightroom cc,adobe photoshop lightroom (software),hue tutorial,lightroom tutorial for beginners,post processing,adobe lightroom tutorial,photo editing