Colour Grading - War on Gotham 2017 shoot

[Manfred M]

One area of post-processing I have been working with for the past few weeks is colour grading. We often see this in cinematography (feature films and television programs) where the editors have subtlety change the colour mapping to give a certain "look and feel" to the product. This has made its way into photography as well and is something that has been part of fashion photography for quite some time now. Just a bit of a warning though; one needs to understand colour theory (complementary colours, analogous colours, the colour wheel, etc.) to do this effectively.

Traditionally in photography this means tweaking individual colour channels, usually in the shadow and highlight areas only using curves adjustment layers (sorry Lightroom users, there is no way to do it in that product; all these techniques rely on the use of adjustment layers).

Ever since Photoshop CS6, Adobe has taken something from the video side and brought it into Photoshop using the "Color Lookup" adjustment layer. A good overview on using this tool can be found here:

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/p...or-lookup-cs6/

I wanted to enhance the green spike we tend to see when cool-white fluorescent fixtures are used as green has often been used in cinematography to give a persona or scene that look of criminality or evil. I used this technique on some of the images I shot on Saturday evening during the "War on Gotham - 2017" photo shoot.


1. Enchantress





2. Faeora





3. Lobo





4. The Penguin





From a technical side; I used the Photoshop preset 3DLUT File (using the Color Lookup Adjustment Layer) using the "TensionGreen.3DL" mapping at a flow of just under 50% and the Soft Light blending mode.

[xpatUSA]

There's a similar function in RawTherapee where a hue or a range thereof can be changed in one click-and-drag on a single curve:

Original:



New petal color:



Took about 5 seconds to do the actual change just now.