Nature Photography How To

Ok Lightroom users, do you fully understand the difference between color grading and color correction when editing your photos? If you're not completely sure, the video below from the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom channel will straighten you out in a hurry, while demonstrating a quick and easy color-grading method for enhancing tonal effects and vibrance in Lightroom.

Instructor Julieanne Kost is a notable photographer, author, and expert at all things Adobe who describes herself as a "digital-editing evangelist." Before jumping into her super simple workflow she answers the question posed above.

Kost explains that "color correction is the process of making images appear accurate and true to the original scene. Color grading, on the other hand, involves adding creative color effects to a photo." This four-minute lesson is all about the latter.

The way in which you depict color is critically important for a number of reasons. As Kost says, "it can help shape the story you want to tell and focus a viewer's attention on a certain spot within the frame." Color rendition is also helpful for setting a variety of moods. Kost explains that warmer tones "make us feel happy" while cooler color can often "make us feel sad."

The colors you convey in an image will often stir our emotions, with bright colors rousing a viewer's energy and muted colors providing a calming effect. The foregoing is why color grading is a very subjective process that depends upon whatever look and feel you want to create.

While taking following approach there's no need to fret about whether or not the final result faithfully represents what you saw through the viewfinder, and that's what makes color grading so much fun. Think of this task as a creative outlet for expressing your artistic vision and save color corrections for another day when realism is the goal.

Lightroom offers a wide variety of tools for getting the job done, and some are rather time-consuming and complex. The basic method you'll learn in this video below is perfect for photographers who are new to Lightroom. And you'll achieve very impressive results despite the simplicity of Kost's approach. Once you get the hang of it you can move on to more and more sophisticated techniques.

After watching the lesson take time tine to explore Kost's instructional YouTube channel. Whether you just want to browse or solve a particular problem, there's a whole lot there to learn.

And if you're looking for another simple explainer, take a look at the tutorial we posted from another processing expert who demystifies how Vibrance and Saturation tools work differently to improve the color of your photos.