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Colour grading

Grading is its own module — a colourist's workspace that sits after Develop and shapes the mood of a shot: warm the highlights, cool the shadows, push or pull a single colour, or convert to a considered black and white. It's non-destructive and applies on top of your develop edits.

Opening the Grading module

Select a photo and press ⌥G, or click Grading in the module bar. The photo fills a large canvas with the grading controls down the right; the Explorer sidebar tucks away, because grading is a canvas-first, one-photo-at-a-time task.

At the top of the panel is the Enable Grading switch. It's the master on/off for the whole grade — flick it to A/B your graded look against the ungraded photo instantly. With it off, the grade does nothing, so you can leave a grade in place and toggle it without losing your work.

Where the grade applies

The grade composes after everything in Develop, and it shows up everywhere the finished photo does — the grid, the Loupe, and your exports and prints. Grade data is stored per photo, separately from your develop settings, so the two never interfere.

Colour pins

The heart of the module is the hue/chroma plot and its pins. A pin targets a colour and shifts it. The quickest way to place one is to click the colour you want to change directly on the photo — that seeds a pin from the sampled colour. Then:

  • Drag the pin's outer handle on the plot to shift that colour's hue and chroma (its direction and intensity).
  • Fine-tune with the per-pin Hue, Chroma and Lightness sliders.
  • Set its Range to control how wide a band of similar colours the pin affects.
  • Restrict a pin to a tonal band with the luminance chips — Full, High, Mid, Shadow, or a custom range you drag on the luminance strip — so you can, say, warm only the highlights of a skin tone.

Tone wheels

The Wheels give the classic four-way grade: separate colour wheels for Shadows, Midtones, Highlights and a Global wheel over the whole image. Drag toward a hue to tint that tonal range — cool shadows and warm highlights is the everyday split-tone.

Secondary curves

Secondary curves target one property by another — for example lifting the saturation of only the more saturated colours, or shifting hue across a range of the spectrum. They're for the precise, selective moves a wheel is too broad for.

Black & white

Switch to the B&W tab to convert. Rather than a flat desaturation, an eight-channel mixer lets you set how bright each original colour renders in mono — darken a blue sky, lift skin — and a set of film-filter presets gives you a fast starting point that emulates shooting through a coloured filter on black-and-white film.

Matching a reference

To grade toward a look you already have — a still from a film, or a hero shot from the same set — use the Reference controls:

  1. Load a referenceLoad an image from disk, or use Choose Image… to jump to your Library and pick a catalogued photo as the reference.
  2. Auto-MatchAuto-Match seeds pins from the reference so your photo moves toward its colour balance, ready for you to refine by hand.
Tip

Press Y in the Develop module to preview the current grade there without leaving Develop — handy for checking how a grade sits with an edit you're still tuning.