How I Do Color Grading In Lightroom
There are many different ways to adjust color in Lightroom. The Temperature slider is a starting point and can bias a photo cooler or warmer. Hue, Saturation and Luminance (HSL) is for your primary color adjustments. Curves is another method to bias hues in the shadows, midtones, and highlights.
Then there is the Color Grading panel, the purpose built tool for adding a subtle or strong tint to different tonal regions of your photo. I’ve explained the Color Grading tool before and how to control the transition between the different colors. That’s the advantage of the Color Grading tool - it does the smooth transitions among the colors for you.
Watch the video in this article on how I approach color grading, and also why I choose to color grade an image. Central to my method is cranking the Saturation slider up to 100. It’s not as crazy as it sounds.
Pushing Saturation to 100 helps visualize what areas of your image are affected.
Once you have a hue you like, you can dial back the strength to suite the scene.
Sunset, Arroyo De La Cruz Beach
Contact Scott to commission a print or license this image.
A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.
I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.