Colour grading tools for food photography

Colour grading is a critical part of the post-production stage of photography and filmmaking. The way colours are used and shown have a big impact on the overall look and feel of a shot and can influence the mood and reaction of its audience. In this post, we're going to look at what exactly colour grading is and the colour grading tools available in Adobe Lightroom, which is a very popular editing software for photographers.

What is colour grading?

When you take a photo, your camera interprets the colours that it captures and renders them onto a screen for us to see. Each camera manufacturer interprets colours differently, which is why a photo of the same subject taken by a Canon and a Nikon camera, for example, may have different colours when you look at the Raw images on a screen.

Colour grading refers to the changes you make to the colours in your images that your camera has interpreted. You can adjust the colours to make them more realistic or to make stylistic and artistic changes.

It's important to note that colour correction and colour grading are different things in editing. Colour correction refers to the adjustments you make to the overall colour temperature, tint, exposure, highlights, shadows etc. Colour grading is the changes you make to the colours in your image including the hues, saturations and intensity of colours.

In the next section, we're going to look at which colour grading tools are available to you when editing using Adobe Lightroom.

Colour grading tools in Adobe Lightroom

Calibration

As we mentioned before, each camera manufacturer interprets colours differently.

When the image is imported into your editing software the colours are automatically interpreted so that the images look within the software as they do out of the camera.

The calibration panel in Lightroom can be used to make tiny adjustments to the way the Raw colours are interpreted in your image. It's a powerful colour grading tool that you can work with at the start of your editing process for an image.

If you start moving the Red, Green and Blue Primary "hue" sliders to the left and right you'll notice the colours in your image change with them. You can also increase and decrease the saturation of these primary colours with the "saturation" slider for each one.

Below you can see some examples of the calibration panel in action. On the far left is the raw image, straight out of the camera. The image in the middle has the Green Primary slider set to +100 (at the extreme end to show you the effect), and the image on the right has the Red Primary slider set to +100. Can you see how dramatically these colours change with just a single slider?

There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to how you calibrate colours in your images! You might find that you never touch this panel at all, which is totally fine. The calibration panel is more often used for portrait photography to correct skin tone, but I've enjoyed experimenting with this tool on some personal creative projects related to food subjects. In particular, when shooting outside and there are lots of greens in my frame, I like being able to make additional, tiny changes to the shades and tones.

Hues, Saturation & Luminance

The Hue, Saturation and Luminance panel (HSL for short) is where you can adjust the individual colour shades (hue), strength (saturation) and intensity (luminance).

This is colour grading tool most people will use to adjust colours in their images. For food photography, it's common to work with the saturation and luminance tools more than the hues. This is because we want food photos to be appealing and appetising, so changing the hues to something unnatural runs the risk of turning your viewer off the subject!

Of course, there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to creativity, so play around and see what looks good to your eyes.

Colour Grading Wheels

This one of my favourite panels for editing in Lightroom: Colour Grading (the one with three wheels). This panel used to be called Split Toning in a previous version of Lightroom.

I used to skip over this panel because I didn't really understand it, but once I got my head around it, colour grading is THE panel that adds the final touch of magic to my images.

With the colour grading panel you can add colour to specific areas of the image: in the shadows, midtones or highlights. Use the wheel to select a colour and its saturation, then the slider underneath it to adjust the intensity.

I love using these colour grading wheels near the end of my editing process when I feel like something is missing or the mood just isn't quite right. Adding colour to the shadows or highlights makes a big difference, and you don't need much saturation at all (I normally use a saturation between 5-20 at the most).

Below you can see an example of the colour grading panel at work. Both images have the same edits in other Lightroom panels, but I added oranges to the shadows and highlights to image on the left to create a warmer feel.

The image on the right still has oranges in the shadows but blues in the highlights, which made a huge difference to the story - now it feels much cooler, or as if the salad is being served in the midday sun (when the light temperature is bluer).

Summary

• Colour grading is different to colour correction! Colour grading refers to the changes you make to the colours in your images that your camera has interpreted.
• There are several colour grading tools available in photo editing software, such as Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Using the Calibration panel in Lightroom, you can adjust the way the colours have been interpreted by the software from your camera.
• The Hue, Saturation and Luminance panel allows you to make more changes to individual colours within your image.
• The Colour Grading wheels give you more creative freedom by adding colours to specific areas of your image: shadows, midtones and highlights.