The color grading tool is probably one of the best ways to set a certain mood or feeling within an image. While most corrections are meant to neutralize a scene, the grading tool is used to alter the tones, colors, and exposure levels of the image in order to create a specific mood. For example, a warm and golden light may help give a warm and cozy feel to a portrait while a blue and teal tone may give a more melancholic and peaceful effect. With the grading tool, it’s all about subtly. You want the viewer to feel the mood and emotions you are trying to convey in your photo, but you don’t want it to be so obvious that they can tell you manipulated the color tones.
The first step is to understand the emotional connotations that the various colors on the color wheel carry. Reds and magentas evoke warmth and attention; these colors are perfect for highlighting lips, cheeks, and clothing elements that have a strong emotional importance. Greens, especially when desaturated, are associated with healthy and fresh or anxious feelings. Deep purples are often linked to mystery or luxury. Knowing how to separate these colors via luminosity masks or through the HSL tab will provide you with a convenient way to control the same color family independently. For instance, you can apply a slight warmth to the subject’s skin while applying a touch of coolness to the background to separate the model from the background with a natural but emotionally resonant method that brings the subject into the viewer’s world.
Grading will always depend on how the picture was shot. I find that if a picture was shot during golden hour, I like to push it even further to help achieve a more romantic or calming atmosphere. Conversely, if the image was shot during the middle of the day, I will usually desaturate the mid-tones and open up the shadows to make it feel less dramatic and more inviting. When it comes to nighttime or darker images, I will pay particular attention to color gradations to help prevent any color blocking artifacts, which helps keep the atmosphere and dimensionality of the photograph intact. All of these rules are loosely applied depending on the tone that I want to achieve in the photograph, but one rule that I do try to adhere to is maintaining skin tones — bringing cold highlights back to neutral can bring back a healthy feel to a subject, without making the picture look unnatural. This will help ensure the overall feel of the picture feels more natural, and in line with the intention of the photograph.
More experienced colorists stack several grading passes to achieve a more sophisticated look. First, a global pass establishes the look, then regional corrections are applied to skin, garments, or scenery. Contrast might be added to midtones in areas such as eyes and mouth, and subtle lifts applied to the shadows to expose more color. All these choices combine to create a look that appears harmonious because each pass reinforces the others. With experience, retouchers develop their own style — an identifiable treatment of greenish shadows or warm skin tones that becomes a calling card of sorts.
When selective color grading is done right, it shouldn’t be noticeable at all. Instead of commenting on the color grading, the viewer will comment on the overall mood of the image. A subtly retouched portrait might read as introspectively confident, nostalgically romantic, intimately innocent, or theatrically powerful, without the viewer even realizing why. In this way, selective color grading is more about interpretation than editing, an attempt to read the emotional content of a photo as much as edit it.