In this Lightroom tutorial, we will talk about how to get great color correction in your photos by the numbers or just color correcting until it looks the way that you want it to look. We’ll use some tricks of the White Balance tool, check out the Histogram, and even break it all down by channel suing a point Curves adjustment. You’re going to love this video!
Using the White Balance Tool
Grab the White Balance tool in Lightroom by going into the Develop module and hitting the letter “W” to pick up the White Balance eyedropper tool. To correct an image simply hover over an area that you think should be neutral and not have any color cast (an area that should be white or light gray usually will work best) and click to kill off any color cast that may be plaguing your image.
Using the Eyedropper’s Readouts and White Balance Sliders
When you’re using the eyedropper tool and hovering over your image, you will notice an RGB readout at the bottom of the pop-up that appears. We can tweak the overall color and white balance of the image by first clicking on the input numbers to the right of the Temperature slider over in the Basic area and then go hover over a part of your image you wish to adjust the color of and use your Up/Down Arrow Keys to change the balance between the R, G, and B channels and watch the change happening in real-time as you’re hovered over a part of the image. TIP: Use the Tab key to jump down to the Tint slider and adjust greens/magentas and Shift + Tab to jump back up to the Temperature slider and continue tweaking the overall color. Check out the video to see exactly how I do this if you can’t seem to make it work.
Having Fun with Curves to Correct Color
We can use the White Balance eyedropper to check out different areas of our image and then go into the Curves panel armed with a general idea of the numbers and use the Red, Green, or Blue channels in the Point Curve to pull Red/Cyan, or Green/Magenta, or pull Blue/Yellow into the shot and then go check on the image with the White Balance tool again to see how the color correction looks by the numbers. The beauty of this technique is that you have an idea of the best color correction based on the numbers, but you can adjust the Curves until it looks good to you and then see how it works based on the numbers. This is one of my favorite ways to color correct.
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