# The Secret to Color in Lightroom (That Most Photographers Miss)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nigel Danson
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZoaWt9BbmM
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/43956

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

Morning everyone. Fantastic to see you all again. In this video, I'm going to talk all about color in Lightroom and how to create your own style. And I've got a guest appearance. Right. Um, so we've all scrolled through Instagram, haven't we? And you look at a photo and you go, I bet that's James's. I bet that's Neil Benell's. People have a style and you can see an image straight away. I know when I see an image that's Jack Lodges, I can just say that's Jack Lodges. And it's just so obvious because of his style. Um, a big part of that is colors and colors make a style really prominent. Now, there are other things like um contrast and luminosity and how people dodge and burn it, but color is a big part, probably the biggest part of any style. So, in this video, I'm going to go through all the ways that you can change color in Lightroom. And there are a few. Let me show you. A big thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode. The first thing is white balance. So, you can go and change white balance, and that changes every single pixel in the image, and I'm going to get on to that in a second. Um, and when you're doing these things, they're meant to be done sort of in order, although I sort of don't always do that. Uh, you can obviously change contrast because that changes color by adding saturation. You can change vibrance and saturation. Um, obviously that changes color. Never touch those really. Um he says having put a little bit of vibrance on this image. You can change the curve um the red, green and blue on the curve. I don't really touch that very much. You can change the color mixer. Um you can see in this one I've changed it quite significantly on this particular image. And you can change color grading which a lot of people struggle with and I'm going to get on to that later on in the video. Uh, and you can also change the calibration down here, which is an underused tool, I think, and it's when you're struggling a little bit, and I'll show on a particular image, it can really help out. So, um, let's go right to the top and we'll go into white balance. So, white balance and one at the top, one at the bottom, calibration, are quite similar and that's because they alter every pixel in the image. Basically what they do is that they either change the underlying red primary, green primary and blue primary color and that's calibration or they change how the ratios of those colors are showing in each pixel and that is white balance. Um, and I can go into a lot of detail on that but that's all you need to know. If you're changing any of the calibration or the white balance, you're changing every single pixel in the same way in the image. Um, and depending on the amount of red, green, and blue that um, looks different on every pixel. So here you can see that everything's changing um, in this. If you looked at something was white or gray on that, even that would be changing because the whole idea is that something that's gray or white, i. e. the red, green, and blue pixels have the same value. So 55 55 5500 0, it will make sure they look white within the image. Um, so and this one calibration this, if I just change the red primary, you can see that that's going to change everything in the image. There's no blue in this image, is there? But if I change this blue, you can see that every pixel's changing in the image. Now, this allows you to it's almost like a camera style um that and every camera's got this baked into their um camera. So that's why you look at a Fuji and you say the greens look good on it or a Canon. Don't know what you say looks good on a Canon, but um you understand what I mean. Look best on a Nikon, let's face it. So let's get on to white balance quickly. And um I'm going to look at this image here. And you can see that if I just change the temperature on this image um if I warm it up, that looks awful. If I cool it down, can you see that there's some banding just in the sky there? And that's because if you just look at these peaks on the histogram, they're just getting saturated. Um, and basically what you're doing is the red, green, or blue within these images just can't it just can't you're not getting enough information. So, you're getting that sort of banding. So, you got to be super careful with it. And what I like to do is just get what looks like and in this image, there's a little bit of blue there. I really like and not go too much one way or the other. Um, now it was early in the morning, so it probably was, um, a low color temperature. So, um, I just get it to what I think my eye looks right. And again, everything's going to be different for everybody. The other thing is that you could change the calibration. So if I wanted to, I could change the blue calibration here because this is a really good way of just making the sky look the orange of the sky look

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

a little bit better. So if I just reduce this and reduce the saturation of the blue, I find that quite often in sunsets can be work wonders in doing things. But you can play around with these. I'm going to come back to these on another image. Um, right. Let's go onto this image and I'm going to quickly go through the color mixer. So, I'm just going to reset this because I've just been messing with it. And I'm not going to edit it um the whole image, although I am going to change that horizon otherwise it will bug me. Um, but what I would say is that the best thing to do on here is not mess with the hue too much. So you can maybe move it, I don't know, minus or plus 20, no more than that. Otherwise, you're just going to get weird results. Going to look like a different planet. But um quite often it's quite good to use this little picker here. And I quite like changing the hue on the uh on the sea here. And I just add some green and aqua here just to move it closer to blue. I think that looks nicer. And then also with the saturation, I might just take the green and just add some in. And luminance as well is really useful. So this changes the colors that you can see in the image. Not the underlying pixel RGB, but the colors that you can see in the images. And you can do that on red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta. Um, it's really useful. I use this on every single image. And you can also use this in masks now, which was an update a while back. Um, and that's really useful as I'll show you on the final image. Okay, I want to go into this image and I want to show you my edit from start to finish on this image because I think this would be useful. There's a few tools I would use on this. So, the first thing is I would set the white balance and I'd usually just maybe add a little bit of purple. I find if you move the tint a little bit more purpley without creating a cast, you can bring out some colors in woodlands. Um and and really what you're trying to do is I find is differentiate those greens. That's really important. I'm not going to change any of these at the moment. I'm going to go into the curve here and I'm just going to get rid of the blacks because I don't really like blacks in woodland. And I might just slightly reduce the whites. But I'm going to increase the shadows just by lifting this up. And then I'm just going to put a few points on here because I don't want to change the whites too much. So I want to just basically it always takes me ages to do this. Right. So that that's not far off. I'll probably come back to this at a certain point, but I just want to get the contrast about right in the image before I start messing with the colors. So now I'm going to start messing with the colors a little bit. So, um, green I find better when it's just a little bit more towards yellow rather than more towards aqua. That doesn't look right. That looks okay. I want the green to be there. So, I just move it down a little bit. Um, I'll probably do the same with the yellow as well. And with the orange, I tend to move it down that way as well because I like to get the ferns to look a little bit redder. And then the saturation, I usually desaturate things. Um, but in this case, I'm just going to increase the saturation of the fern and then just drop the yellow and the green a tiny amount just because that's my style. Now, you might not want to do that, but I like it when it's just a little bit softer. I like that painterly look. The other thing that I didn't say is on this, I'd usually dehaze it a little bit as well. Um, I'd also probably add a gaussium blur in Photoshop, but I like a little bit dehaz and a little bit negative clarity. I mean, there's a lot of masks that I'd put on there. Um, but I'm not going to do that now cuz it takes quite a long time to edit a photo with all the mass. But sometimes when you've got these greens, I find that just messing around with these can really help. So, you can see that this um, so I quite like desaturating the reds a little bit there. And then the blues I find, can really help with the greens. So if I just basically remember I'm changing the what Lightroom decides is the underlying blue primary color here. So I can make that blue primary color a different color at the starting um of of the pixel. So here again I want to make it a little bit more olive. So I'm going to go that way and I'm going to just increase the saturation of the blues because I think that works. I pulled out some colors up here. So, I've gone from this to this. I mean, it's never a huge change, but it's quite flat. Um, now I may go back and then, you know, mess around with these a little bit because I find now when I've got the basics, then messing around with

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

this can really help me. Um, I might think, okay, it needs to be a bit brighter. And then I I, you know, that's pretty much the colors done. Now, this is that's what I just did. This is one that I spent a long time on editing, this one. So, I've gone pretty close to what I usually do. Um, but you know, you can see that I probably done a few masks on this. I've done one mask on it where I've just tried to mask. Um, I've done some dodging and burning on the tree trunk. So, I asked two photographers that I know well, James Popsis and Neil Benell, both use color massively in their edits. And I'll share Neil's at the end of the video, but James, on the way to the dentist, left this message for us. — Hello, mate. Um, I'm on my way to the dentist. Absolutely terrified. Um, but yeah, editing color, my tip, I think, would be that, uh, editing color is much like how I think about priorities. Um, in that if you've got a to-do list and you've got 30 items on it and you deem everything to be a priority, then in effect, nothing is a priority. Uh, and how I think about that relating to color is that if you've got a photo where you want to increase the um the impact of the oranges for instance, then quite obviously you might uh boost the saturation of the oranges. But just as importantly, you need to take down the saturation of the greens, for instance, and the yellows, which will do two things. It'll mean that you don't have a crazily oversaturated image, but it'll also in effect deprioritize the other colors and make the orange stand out. Um, so yes, priorities is how I think about colors. Hopefully that helps. Um, yeah, good luck with the video. Please wish me luck at the dentist. Speak soon, mate. Bye. — Thanks, James. And good luck at the dentist. Okay, I want to show you one more thing, but before I do that, I just want to say thanks to this week's sponsor, and that is Squarespace. Whilst I've been away, I've been updating my Squarespace site, and in particularly um I've been adding to my gallery of England counties. I do this in Squarespace. It's really easy to do to create amazing looking pages like this where I've just added some of the images that I've edited on my way doing this England counties project. Um, and it just super easy to do with Squarespace. You're in control of the photos. If you want to, as well, you can sell things like I do, like calendars and books. So, if you're looking to maybe make some money out of your photography and start to sell your own presets, maybe um your ebooks, your books, your calendars, and it's super easy to do that with Squarespace. If you're looking to do it, you can get 10% off by using offer code Nigel or going to squarespace. comigel. Right, let's go back to Lightroom. So, here's an image that um I'm just going to reset. So, this is the base image here. And what I would do, just do a quick just increase the things here. Now, one of the things I really like to do when I'm shooting silver birches is all the yellows in this these yellow little leaves here, I like to increase those and make them just pop a little bit, add saturation into them. There's loads of different ways you could do that. One of the that is I could just go and add saturation here. But can you see when I'm doing that is changing these grasses down here, um the grass here, the moss on this rock. I don't want it to do that. I only it on these actual leaves. The way there's two ways you can do that. There's one way which is you just use a color range mask and I can just go and pick this leaf here and then I can just mask that off. Um, and this is the this is a way that I like to do it. Um so then I can say um intersect that with a radial gradient or I could just do it with a brush and I can just select that area. So that's like the color of those leaves and this area. And then what I can do is I can um [snorts] go and just increase the um color of it, the saturation of it, and maybe add some brightness just to make it pop. Now, you've got to be a little bit careful with that, especially with the amount um of your of here because you can refine the colors that this applies to. And what I find is if you have this too low, you can get like really weird effects. So, make sure if you're doing it to a larger area, you're looking at you're not getting banding or anything like that, but I would probably increase that to about there. And then you can just alter it. You can change it to however you want. And I find that's a really good way of just making those leaves pop a little bit. Um, you can do

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 18:00) [15:00]

that to all the colors in this image. So, just by selecting a color and then masking it. Often what I do as well if I just want to do it to a certain bit is that I would brush that on. So, another way of doing it is you would select a color range of maybe these ferns. So, I can just say that area there. Whoa, that's too much, isn't it? That area there. Um, now you've got to be a little bit careful because it might be a bit weird this. But, I could then say, okay, I'm just going to really accentuate this. That's awful. But, um, you get the idea. But then what I do is intersect by clicking the alt key on a Mac with brush. And now it only applies where I paint it on. So, and also because my brush has only got a flow of 47, I have to do it a multiple times to get more of that effect. So, I can then just brush that on where I want it. And if I want to, I can just change the color or the saturation, luminance just of certain parts of the image and certain colors in the image. And basically what I do is I spend hours and hours just tweaking little things over time until I get what I want. And those small changes add up to quite a big change. And this is a really good example. So this was a starting image. And then by spending I don't know probably three or four hours on it, I turned it from that into this where I feel like I've changed the colors, I've changed the greens, I've you know put a big radial um vignette on it and I feel like it's just really improved the image. So I also spoke to Neil Benell about his photos and his editing style. I absolutely love his editing style back when he first did the Wisman series. I think everybody copied that and he sort of started a revolution of woodland photos um and the love of woodland photography. So speaking to Neil, one of the things that's really important to him is just the influency he has on the style of that image. So his wismans were heavily influenced by Star Wars and the planet Deoba. And he just wanted the cinematic tone. So what he's done is added blue in the shadows and like a blue green in the highlights. But in this image, he's just warmed up a little bit. You can see that, you know, he's taken a fairly standard image here and through editing created something really amazing. Now, I'm not saying that you go and follow what Neil does, but I think it's important when you're creating your own style, and Neil also um reiterated this is that you just don't try and force anything. you just let it happen and um try and look for something that might influence you from film maybe um maybe there's some painter that like you like and try and sort of recreate that style. There's no wrong whatsoever. So, I hope you've enjoyed this. If you have, then go and check out James and Neil's stuff. I'll put links below. And um thanks for watching and if you like it, give it a thumbs up. Right, back to photograph some rainbows that I keep seeing out the