What youngsters should know about colour grading
Colour is one of the most important components of photography. In order to achieve the desired effect in pictures, the colours have to tell half the story. To achieve that, photographers apply colour grading technique to their pictures. This technique is primarily used in videos and film, but has quite a bit of use in photography as well. If your youngster is a photography enthusiast and wants to pursue it as a career option, she needs to be well aware of this technique.
What is colour grading?
Colour grading is the process of changing the visual tone of an image by enhancing the colour, saturation and contrast of the image. There are numerous tools available online to facilitate colour grading, like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Also, Instagram’s post editing tools can lead to effective results.
What beginners need to know about colour grading
There are very many ways of enhancing photos. A good starting point would be to tweak basic exposure settings. Adjusting the contrast and exposure alone can change the mood of the image. The colours can be made much more vivid by increasing the vibrance level of the picture. A good way to enhance pictures is by using the HSL or the hue, saturation and luminance adjustments. Here is a quick run-down of these components:
- Hue is synonymous with colour, and measures the tonal values present within a particular image. You can entirely change the colours of the photo with this component.
- Saturation is the measurement of how intense a particular hue is within a particular image. As you increase the saturation of a particular hue, its vividness will increase accordingly within the image, while the more you decrease the saturation of a particular hue will result in said hue appearing increasingly dull and flat.
- Luminance (or lightness) is the most straightforward value of the three, measuring how bright or dark a particular hue is.
As we move on to more advanced techniques, split toning can elevate colour grading entirely. Split toning refers to adding different tints to highlights and shadows – it can add a little something special to an image, especially when it comes to fine art portraiture.
Many presets are also available in the market for colour grading which merely need to be applied to an image with already adjusted values that can be tweaked from picture to picture.
Colour correction
The processes of colour grading and colour correction are different. Colour correction involves adjusting the colours of a picture to make them as accurate as possible. Commonly, it includes adjustments in white balance, contrast, exposure, highlight and noise. Thus, it starts with the camera before an editing software. By adjusting the mentioned features before taking pictures, a significant difference can already be observed in the photos. The same effects can also be achieved in editing software.