How to Color Grade Photos in Lightroom: A Practical Guide

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Color Correction vs. Color Grading

Before touching the Color Grading panel, it helps to understand the difference between correction and grading. Color correction is fixing what's technically wrong: adjusting white balance so whites look white, correcting exposure so the histogram sits where it should, and removing color casts from mixed lighting. Color grading is the creative step that comes after: deliberately pushing hues and shifting tones to create a mood, a style, or a signature look.

Always correct first, then grade. If your white balance is off by 1,000K and you try to grade on top of that, you're fighting the image instead of shaping it. Get the basics right in the Basic and Tone Curve panels, then move to Color Grading.

Finding the Color Grading Panel

In Lightroom Classic, the Color Grading panel lives in the Develop module, below HSL/Color and above Detail. In the cloud-based Lightroom (desktop and mobile), it's under the Color section.

The panel shows three color wheels labeled Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights, plus a Global wheel that applies a tint to the entire image. Each wheel lets you select a hue (the angle around the wheel) and a saturation (the distance from center). There's also a Luminance slider beneath each wheel that lets you brighten or darken that tonal range independently of color.

Two additional controls sit between the wheels: Blending determines how much the shadow and highlight grades overlap in the midtones, and Balance shifts the boundary between what Lightroom considers shadows versus highlights. These two sliders are subtle but powerful for fine-tuning how your grade interacts with the image's tonal distribution.

The Complementary Color Technique

The most universally pleasing color grades use complementary colors: hues that sit opposite each other on the color wheel. This creates visual tension and harmony at the same time. Your eye naturally finds complementary pairings satisfying.

The three most common complementary pairings in photography:

Teal and Orange. The most popular color grade in cinema and photography. Push teal (around 200 degrees on the wheel) into the shadows and warm orange (around 30 degrees) into the highlights. This works because skin tones fall in the orange-yellow range, and the teal shadows create separation that makes skin pop. It's particularly effective for portraits, travel photography, and golden hour landscapes.

Blue and Gold. Similar to teal and orange but cooler. Push a deeper blue (220-240 degrees) into the shadows and a warm gold (40-50 degrees) into the highlights. This produces a more cinematic, moody feel that works well for urban photography, architecture, and dramatic landscapes.

Green and Magenta. Less common but striking for nature and forest photography. Push muted green into the midtones and a subtle magenta into the highlights. This enhances the natural greens in foliage while adding warmth to sunlit areas.

Step-by-Step: Building a Teal and Orange Grade

Let's walk through the most popular color grade from start to finish.

1. Correct the Base Image

Set your white balance so neutral tones look neutral. Adjust exposure, contrast, highlights, and shadows until the image looks properly exposed. This is your clean starting point.

2. Set the Shadow Tone

Click the Shadows wheel. Drag the control point toward teal (roughly 200 degrees on the wheel). Start with low saturation: drag the point only about 30-40% of the way from center to the edge. You can always increase it later.

3. Set the Highlight Tone

Click the Highlights wheel. Drag toward warm orange (roughly 30-40 degrees). Again, keep saturation moderate. The highlights should feel warm without looking like you dipped the photo in marmalade.

4. Adjust Midtones (Optional)

The midtones wheel is where skin tones often live. If your subject's skin is looking too teal or too orange, use the midtones wheel to pull it back toward neutral, or add a very subtle warmth that flatters skin.

5. Fine-Tune with Blending and Balance

Increase Blending (try 50-70) to create a smoother transition between the shadow and highlight grades. This prevents the grade from looking like two separate color washes fighting each other.

Adjust Balance to shift where the split occurs. A negative Balance value pushes more of the image into the shadow grade; positive pushes more into the highlight grade. For teal and orange, a slightly negative Balance (around -10 to -20) usually looks best because it extends the teal into the lower midtones.

6. Check at Full Zoom

Zoom to 100% and scroll through the image. Look for areas where the grade creates unwanted color shifts: skin tones that have gone too blue in shadow areas, or highlights that look unnaturally warm. Dial back saturation on whichever wheel is causing the problem.

Other Popular Looks

Faded Film

Add a muted blue or purple to the shadows (low saturation, around 240 degrees) and a very subtle warm tone to the highlights. Then go to the Tone Curve panel and lift the bottom-left point of the RGB curve to fade the blacks. This combination mimics the look of expired film stock.

Moody Desaturated

Grade the shadows toward deep blue and leave the highlights neutral. Then reduce global saturation by 15-20 in the HSL panel. This creates the dark, desaturated look popular in editorial and fine-art photography.

Warm Golden Hour Enhancement

If you shot during golden hour and want to amplify the warmth, add orange-gold to the highlights and a subtle cool blue to the shadows. This exaggerates the natural color contrast of golden hour light. Pair this with a slight boost to the Vibrance slider (not Saturation, which is too heavy-handed).

Clean and Bright

Push a very subtle warm tone (low-saturation peach, around 20 degrees) into the midtones and a barely-there cool tone into the shadows. Keep luminance bright across all three wheels. This produces the airy, light-filled look popular in wedding and lifestyle photography.

Using HSL Alongside Color Grading

The Color Grading panel applies tints to tonal ranges (shadows, midtones, highlights). The HSL/Color panel targets specific hues regardless of their brightness. Used together, they give you complete color control.

A common workflow: use HSL to shift individual colors (make greens more teal, warm up yellows, desaturate distracting reds), then use Color Grading to apply an overall mood on top. For example, in a forest scene, you might shift the HSL Green hue slider toward teal, reduce Orange saturation to mute any distracting warm tones in tree bark, and then apply a subtle teal-to-gold color grade to unify the image.

The HSL panel is also where you protect skin tones. If your color grade is pushing skin into unflattering territory, use the HSL Orange and Red hue and saturation sliders to correct it without affecting the rest of the image.

Saving Grades as Presets

Once you've built a color grade you like, save it as a preset so you can apply it to other images instantly. In Lightroom Classic, click the "+" button in the Presets panel and check only the Color Grading box (plus any other adjustments you want to save). Name it something descriptive: "Teal-Orange Portrait Grade" is more useful six months from now than "My Preset 12."

Presets are starting points, not destinations. Apply the preset, then adjust saturation and balance to suit each individual image. A grade that looks perfect on a golden hour portrait may need dialing back on an overcast street scene.

Common Mistakes

Oversaturation. The most common error. If you can immediately tell a photo has been color graded, the grade is probably too strong. Subtle grades that enhance the mood without announcing themselves are almost always more effective. A good test: step away from your screen for 30 minutes, then come back and look at the image with fresh eyes.

Fighting the light. Trying to make a blue hour photo look like golden hour, or grading a flat overcast scene as if it were dramatic sunset light, rarely works. The best grades enhance what the light was already doing, not contradict it.

Ignoring the Global wheel. The Global wheel is useful for quick grades when you have a specific overall tone in mind. A very low-saturation warm global tint can unify an entire gallery of images, even if you fine-tune individual shots with the three-wheel system afterward.

Not calibrating your monitor. If your display shows inaccurate colors, you're grading blind. A hardware calibrator like the Datacolor SpyderX or Calibrite ColorChecker Display ensures what you see on screen matches what viewers will see on their calibrated displays and in print.

Workflow Integration

Color grading should be one of the last steps in your editing workflow, not the first. A solid order: import and cull, apply lens corrections and chromatic aberration fixes, set white balance and exposure, adjust tone curve, refine HSL/Color, apply Color Grading, add local adjustments (masks, gradients), sharpen and reduce noise, then export.

For a complete walkthrough of the Lightroom editing process, see our Lightroom Classic beginner guide. If you prefer a free alternative, our darktable beginner guide covers similar color grading concepts in an open-source workflow.

After editing, use ExifGrabber to check the EXIF data on your original RAW files. Understanding the camera settings and lighting conditions that produced each shot helps you make better color grading decisions: knowing a photo was shot at 5200K daylight versus 3200K tungsten tells you what the scene's natural color temperature was, which informs whether your grade should lean warm or cool.