The Secret to Better Color in Lightroom Classic

We've all shot photographs where the color needs to be tweaked just a little bit. Today, I'll run through a workflow inside of Lightroom Classic that uses masks to do some color shifts in your image. Hi, I'm Terry Vander Heiden, professional photographer. While I think it's a good idea to make sure your color balance in the camera is set properly, sometimes you forget, or worse, you leave it on auto color and just hope for the best. In post-processing in Lightroom Classic, we can adjust color pretty easily. But if we want to take our color to the next level, we need to turn to masking. So let me show you a workflow that I've used inside of Lightroom Classic that you may want to start using yourself. I try to release a video every Tuesday morning, and if you'd like to work along with me with the same images I'm working on during this tutorial, then all you have to do is sign up for my mailing list. A few days before the video goes live, you'll receive a link with the images to download and work on the exact images that I'm working on here today. To get on the mailing list, it's super easy. Just go to my website, imagelight.com, go to the menu, scroll over to subscribe, and fill out the form that pops up. Next time I do a video that has images to work on, you'll get them in advance. So let's jump into Lightroom Classic, and I'll show you how to work with color and masks. I've got a couple of images here. We'll just open this one here. This is a fall scene. Obviously, this was shot in Maine. And let me go into develop module. And the first thing we're going to do in this image, just before we get to the color, is it was shot in kind of a foggy, misty day. So what we want to do is come down to the presence area of the basic panel and go to dehaze, and let's add some contrast in there. And dehaze is just a perfect tool for that. You can see the difference of what that does in just a simple slide of a slider. So I really like using dehaze when it needs to be used. And in this case, with the mist, that's one of the reasons we try to use it. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in and do a couple of things with masks. So the first thing I'm going to do is go in here, and I'm going to go to range down here under mask, and we're going to go to color range. And what we'll do is this is a point where you get to pick the colors that you'd like to enhance. So I'd like to enhance the yellows, and it'll grab all of those yellows. In fact, let's do this. Let's do our overlay, and we'll make that a different color. We're going to make that the green color. That way we can see this a little bit better because we're working with red tones. So I like to change that overlay from time to time. So that grabbed all of the yellows. So let's go in here, and we'll make sure our yellows are nice and warm, and then we'll adjust the saturation on those a little bit as well. And we can also go in and let's add another mask. This will also be a color range mask, and we'll just choose the reds. This is what's great with that color range mask, is you can go in and just select the colors that you want to work on and enhance them or bring them back, you know, fade them back if you like. It's really a pretty cool tool, and it grabs all those same colors. And you can stack them up as well. I'll show you that in just a second. So we've chosen the red, but if we want to get this maroon color, we just hold the shift key down and add that maroon color to it as well. And so now we've got all of that selected. You can see in our mask here what we've got. So now what we're going to do is we're going to make that a little more red. So what I can do is I could bring up and try to find red here by just pulling on these sliders, or let's zero those back. You can go down to this color box here and find a red that you like, like maybe this red here, and we can add some red to that. And we'll move this out of the way for a second so we can see that. Now that's obviously way extreme, right? But we can pull the saturation back on that. And then always, whenever you're working on any mask, whenever you've got a mask highlighted, you can come over here to the amount of that and back that off to whatever you want. So that's backed off to nothing, and this just creeps it up just a little bit. So that is a way that we can take and use color mask. Here's the on and off. There's, of course, the dehaze is included in that. But we can see how we can enhance those colors, those reds, those yellows, whatever color we want by not really affecting the greens that are in the background here. We're letting those greens go on their own, because if we were to do this and just pull saturation as a complete saturation pull, we're going to enhance all of the greens as well in the trees. So we're just grabbing the main colors that we want to enhance by using a color range mask. So here's another image that we have up here. Go into the basic panel. And whenever I'm doing color correction, I like to make sure that I'm wearing neutral colors, because you don't want to wear a bright red shirt that might reflect off your screen and then come back into and change the way that you're perceiving the color. So if you know you're going to work on color that day, then wear something neutral, a white, gray, black, something like that, that isn't going to be tinting your screen, which then will kind of reflect on back in your eyes and maybe change what you're actually looking at. So as we open up the basic panel, we have this eyedropper tool. And this is pretty powerful because this is a simple color correction tool, right? And what you do is you hover over any of the tones in your image. And what you're looking for is you're looking for a neutral color, be it white, black, or gray. And so let's hover this over the white in his muzzle right there. And we can see that those numbers are pretty darn close down at the bottom. If you looked at the target numbers down there, red, 64, green, 65, blue, 68. So those are pretty close, which means when those are even, that's probably going to be a pretty neutral color. Another way that you can look at things is as you're moving this around, take a look over here at the navigator. Have that open and you can see how it changes color. See how that makes going to tint it really blue. And so you can look there to see, well, what's most pleasing to you. As we look at this, we hover this little eyedropper around. I look over, not only does it seem pretty neutral on the numbers down below, but it gives it a nice warm look on the face. So we're going to click on that. And that's how we're going to change the color of this image pretty simply. Now with using masks here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the, make a mask and we're going to make a radial gradient. And this one we're going to click and drag and make a really huge mask here. And we're going to move this over to the side. So what this is going to be doing is we're going to kind of try to, this was shot on a very overcast day. So there really wasn't a direction of light other than just, you know, soft light coming from above. So what we're going to do here is we're going to bring in a little bit of warmth inside of that. So let's go ahead and make that a little more yellow. Maybe add just a tick of magenta. And we can see that, let me go ahead and turn that off for you. We can see before and after what we've done. We've neutralized the color with the basic panel, but then we've added color coming in a little deeper on this side of the animal to just give a little bit more dimension in that. And we can probably take this a step further. Let's see if this works. We'll click these little buttons up here, these three little dots. And we're going to go duplicate and inverse. So that radial gradient, see how everything except that radial gradient is going to be chosen. And let's just cool that side down. So if you, you figure the shadows are usually cool and highlights are the things that are in the sunlight are going to be warmer. So you can actually alter the color that way based on how you're doing things, right? So if you try to add a little bit of blue to the shadows and you use a little bit of warmer tones for the main portion of your image, kind of duplicating how sun is coming in. So sunlight's coming in, warming up side of the face, but on the other side of the face, it's going to actually be cool. So that's two ways that you can do it. Let's take a look at our before and after. So that looks pretty good. Let me show you one more here. If you like this kind of content, hit that like button. When you hit the like button, what happens is YouTube says, wow, a lot of people like this video. We're going to push it out to other people of that might have this similar interest. So it gets more views for my video. So I really appreciate that. And if you're not a subscriber, hit that subscribe button and you ring the little bell icon. And what happens is YouTube every, in my case, every Tuesday, is going to send you a little note saying, Hey, Terry's got a new video out. So go check it out. So that's a way people can be alerted to the video. One of the best ways to contact me is through the comment section. If you leave a comment, what happens is more people that are coming to this video can learn from it. I learned tons from the people that comment on my video. They have ideas and workflows that I'd never thought of. And for me, that's fantastic. And I think other people that watch, that read the comments, you can get a lot more out of the videos by seeing what people are saying and also seeing what actually, maybe there's some new ideas that I haven't thought of or didn't demonstrate. So check that out and leave a comment. Also, you can always email me terry at imagelight.com and get ahold of me that way. So I got one more image I want to show you using masks. That's kind of cool. So I was down at the beach and I photographed this little sanderling here. Let's go ahead and crop it up nice and tight. When I'm cropping and I have an animal that's moving across the screen, I always like to leave a little bit of space for him to go into, as opposed to just making it a straight crop where he's dead center. I like to put them off to the side a little bit so that, I don't know, I just think it flows a little bit better in terms of composition. So then we've got this guy here. It looks pretty good. As we're looking at it though, we can see that it's pretty monochromatic, right? And let's see if we can add some warmth and a little bit of color to this whole image. So one of the first things we're going to want to do is maybe bring down the highlight. So let's slide this highlight slider down. And then if we want to bring up the shadows in here, we can do that as well. We can go ahead and bring up the shadows a little bit if we'd like. So that's a start. First thing we're gonna do is create a linear gradient mask. Let's go ahead and drag that up here. Now, what we're doing is just masking out the sand. So we're going to maybe bring the exposure down a little bit. But here's a place where we really want to warm this sand up. So one of the ways we can do it, we've seen before, is we can use our sliders and warm it up that way. And that's a pretty good way to go. We can also take our color and say, well, what's a good sand color? Maybe it's like right in there. And you can decide the saturation here if you like. So we'll just pump it all the way up. We're pretty close to high. That's a little too much. But remember, we can always come up here to this slider and slide that mask back a little bit, taking away some of that extreme that we've done in the mask. There, we've darkened it just a little bit. So the next one we're going to do is we're going to come up here and make a new mask. And we're going to make it a select object. Remember, on the object selection, you've got two choices. You can use a brush or you can use this little box. I almost always use the little box and try that first because it just goes so much faster. And yep, see, it did a great job. It selected out just the sanderling. And so now what we're going to do is we're going to do some changes on this. Let's go into our color. And we're going to add a little bit of warmth to it. And warmth generally is I'm sliding the temperature up towards the yellows a little bit. And I'm going to be also bringing in the magenta a little bit more. So that's adding some warmth in there, which actually looks pretty good. So we've got the mask here. And a lot of times, it's a good idea is to mask this. So we can just know that that is the actual bird itself. And then what we're going to do is we've got that. We've done our foreground. We've done our actual subject. And now what we're going to do is create another mask. So we'll click on this. And we're going to say, well, let's try this first. Let's create a new mask. And we'll say we want to select the background. So when we select the background, it doesn't do a great job. One, it didn't get down in through here. And it selected everything. So let's just get rid of that. And you can right-click and just delete that mask. We're going to click on these three little dots, come down to duplicate and inverse. And then we've got all of this mask here. But again, we've probably masked a little too much here with this bottom. So what we want to do is we want to make some changes to that. So let's subtract with a linear gradient. So now we've got a fairly good graded background. So this background is the ocean. So what do we want to do? We want to make that a little more blue. So let's slide this slider back over here. Now you can see what we've done here. Let's go ahead and squish this down a little bit. That's how we started, a monochromatic shot. But when we ended, we've added color to the bird itself. We've opened up the shadows. And then we've also tinted the front as well. So you could probably take this another step further. And this is probably what I would do is add a new mask. It's going to be a radial gradient. Let's go ahead and turn these back on. So we can see what our masks are. And then I'll actually take this radial gradient and invert it. And this will be our vignette. So we'll darken this just a little bit. I think you've seen me do this before. We darken this a little bit on the edges. And then I bring the saturation down as well on the edges. So the focus comes right to the image itself. Let's turn those off. Slide this out of the way. And we can see our before and after. So that's how I use masks. It's a fairly quick process. If you're used to using masks, masks are something that is just really refined inside of Lightroom Classic. And if you use them, the more you use them, the faster you're going to get at them. So I really encourage you to try using some of this. And of course, if you're on my mailing list, you'll have these images that you can work on. And you can see exactly, do the exact same steps I did. And then take it over to your own images and just simply use masks to change the color a little bit in the areas that you want to change. All right, we'll see you next time.