Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Color Balance Example

After the last post, I thought it might be good if I went through an example of how I would color balance an image in Lightroom. I’m going to use a image of Jenny, one of my Production Associates who helped me test out a lighting technique the other day.

We were working with some off camera flashes balanced with natural light. I’ll try to do a post on that shoot another time, but I had some of the images in Lightroom, so let’s take a look at what I’d do with an image we made.

To correct density for an image, what we’ve found works for us is to first set the exposure to the point where the image shows some true whites in it, then set the shadows to set the black point and then use the brightness slider to set our mid-tones.

Depending on the image, we want to see true whites and true blacks and nice middle tone details. For instance, if we have a groom in a black tux, we want to see his teeth as white and his tux should have parts on it that are truly black.
To do that, we first use the “Exposure” slider to set our “white point.” We will move it up and watch it until it shows that some of the white pixels on the image are “blown out”. Pixels have a britness setting from 0-255. When they reach 255 they are as bright as they can go. We like to see some pixels that barely reach 255. Maybe they are 250 or 253.

Then we will back it off a little until they are right at the brink of being blown out. The image looks like this:


Then we will do the same thing for the “Blacks” in an image. We want to see some true blacks “0” in the shadows. This is especially nice if you can get it in the subjects hair. Be careful not to lose all the shadow detail in the image.



Then, we’ll bring our brightness down to the point where we have pleasing mid-tones and we’ll set the color tempature, saturation and vibrance to get the images color where we want it:



The Lens correction dialog is very useful in creating vignettes that focus the attention on our main subject by applying a dark vignette around our subject:



And finally, we’ll zoom all the way in and make our sharpening selection.


And in the end we have a much more pleasing image:

Straight Out of the Camera:


After Lightroom:

How We Color Balance our Images

There are extensive tutorials on the Adobe site, but I thought I’d give you a quick peek at how we use it.

First we import all the images using an Import preset we created for Photojournalism. That preset provides a “baseline” for all our images. We click File and then Import Images and import the RAW or Jpeg files into Lightroom.
After we have the images in Lightroom we begin working on them.

For each image, we have to decide how we want the image to tell the story. If we want a photojournalistic approach, then we’ll color balance the image to be something you’d see perhaps in Time Magazine or National Geographic.

If we want a more editorial look, we’ll stylize the image like something you might see in a fashion magazine. We might use some of our “creative” presets and do some cross processing, or make everything really blue and moody or bright and happy (like our California girl preset.)

Once we’ve decided on a look, we color correct each image. We set the exposure, then the blacks and then change the brightness to get the midtones where we want them, then we tweak the overall contrast. That sets the “Density” of the image. We like to see true blacks and true whites in every image if possible.

Then we’ll work on the color. We’ll first check the white balance. We may make the image warmer or cooler using the Temp and Tint sliders. After we have our white balance, we’ll set the Vibrance and Saturation to get the amount of color in the image we want.

The Vibrance slider algorithm tries not to affect skin tones so if we are happy with the skin tones we have we’ll use the Vibrance slider to make the other colors pop in the image and if we want some more “tan” in their skin, we’ll use the Saturation slider a little and then the Vibrance slider. It seems like we just use the Vibrance slider most of the time.

After we’ve set the Density and Color then we’ll do any red eye correction and spot correction. Then we’ll set the Vignette using our Vignette presets or the Lens Corrections dialog. If we use a strong Vignette, then we might have to change our density a little to compensate (make it brighter again).

The final thing we’ll do is sharpen our image using the Detail Sharpening dialog. If it’s a portrait we want to make sure we have a “crisp” image but not one that’s so sharp that someone’s pores show too strongly. Adobe has a portrait sharpening preset that comes with it that sets the Amount to 35, Radius to 1.2, Detail to 20 and Masking to 70. Landscapes are set at 40, 0.8, 50, and 0. I generally start there, zoom in and then make adjustments as needed.

If there is noise in the image we will use the noise reduction dialog. If there is one color in the image that is distracting, like someone’s pink shirt, we’ll use the HSL dialog to tone it down a bit.

After all the images are color corrected, we’ll renumber them and then export them as Jpegs. We use the export dialog to burn a disc so we’ll have a hard copy of all the Jpegs for the physical file.

Once the Jpegs are created and the Jpeg discs are made, we’ll remove the folder from Lightroom.

After the Images have been color and density corrected, we’ll edit the images in Photoshop and do additional retouching work such as selective sharpening, dodging and burning and liquefy.

And that’s briefly how we do our color balance work here at my studio. I hope that gives you some ideas around your own workflow.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

If you are into editing images and want great color correction capabilities and want a clean and simple interface, I recommend Adobe Photoshop Lightroom! We’ve been using it since version 1.0 (okay, so it’s only on version 1.3 now) and while it has had a few “Version 1.0” bugs, they have been addressed and it’s really made us much more efficient and allowed us to produce better results than ever before.

Lightroom costs $299. We think it’s well worth it. All of our PCs have it installed and we use it on every job we do here at our studio. I can’t recommend it enough!

Our Workflow After Capture

From time to time we get asked from other photographers what goes on after we capture images in the camera in my studio production group. There are so many individual steps that I’d like to go through in detail in future posts, but I thought I’d give you a general idea of our process.

First and foremost, we make sure to Archive those images and get them offsite! We have one PC that is dedicated to creating DVD backups from the memory cards we use. It burns the DVDs, creates labels and stores it on our network drives. We have over three terabytes (as of right now) of storage for our photography files. Yes, we shoot in RAW and wouldn’t have it any other way!

After the Archive comes the Edit. We look through all the images to remove any that have blinks and select the best from the session or wedding. We’re looking for images that best tell the story of the wedding or portrait that we were shooting.
Then, we import all the images into Adobe Lightroom and begin the color balance work. We love Lightroom and I’ll talk more about it in another post, but it’s been one of the best software purchases we’ve done.

We use some custom presets that we’ve created here to help us achieve the looks we want and then we tweak the images further until we get exactly the look we’re going for.

Then, we renumber the edited images and export them from Adobe Lightroom as Jpegs. Every image we produce here has a Job number and a sequential number assigned to it. So, some day in the future if a client brings us a photograph, we will just turn it over and see that it was “1345_0046” as the file name (our lab prints the file names on the back of our photographs). We will go to our files and look up job “1345” and get image number 0046 from the disc and reprint it.

After that, we take the color corrected images into Adobe Photoshop and run actions on them for selective sharpening and other color work. Then we do any final density and contrast adjustments, dodge and burn and vignette. When we look at an image, we’re looking for the story it tells. If there’s something in that image that is distracting from the story, we want to down play it by burning it in or take it out completely with the clone stamp tool.

Then, we post the images online or create a disc for our wedding clients and store a copy of the final Jpegs in a physical file folder we keep for all our jobs.
We keep all of our job information on a custom designed online database that we created to keep track of things in our studio.

Give that Image some Texture!

This is so cool. Texturing is a lot of fun and a great way to make your images pop and add more interest. I love doing this sort of thing with Senior’s and or maybe even engagements. It gives the images a grungy textured appearance.

To start with, I go out and shoot textures that catch my eye. The one I’ll use for this entry was actually a rusty side of my Dad’s Box blade that he pulls behind his tractor. I photographed one side of it and then pulled that photograph into Photoshop and retouched it. This is what I was left with:



Jenny works for me as a production associate in my studio and was kind enough to let me photograph her. Here’s the original image of her:



I took one of the images we did and the texture I had made before and applied the texture to her image and wound up with something like this:



I first opened her image up in Photoshop. Once it was opened, I opened the image of the texture and the added it as a layer to Jenny’s picture by dragging the image over the top of hers. Once it was on top of her image in Photoshop, I changed the opacity of the Box Blade image to 30 percent and changed the mode to “Hard Light”. The different modes produce different effects, some of which are really cool. Here’s the Photoshop file in case you’d like to play around with it:

Click Here to Download a small PSD of this file.

It’s fun to just go out and shoot sidewalks, bricks, glass, anything that catches your eye and then superimpose it over your images. It’s a great tool to tell your story the way you want it to be. I think it’s kind of artsy and I think it’s pretty cool at times.

I hope you enjoy the idea and go out there and make it your own!