5 Color Hacks for Better Photo Results

You are the type of photographer who searches out vivid colors in the wild. You capture beautiful outdoor images, and you do your best in Lightroom to enhance the colors. However, you may not be utilizing all the color options. In this Premium video lesson, photographer David Johnston takes you into his edit suite and demonstrates certain color hacks to improve your color images.

Using his image of a forest scene, David’s first color hacks tip is to use the Profile Adjustment tool. The default is Adobe Color, but there are also several more color profiles you can try. If you’ve captured a landscape image, for instance, just click on Adobe Landscape, which brings out more vibrance and saturation. The second of the color hacks is the use of hue, saturation, and luminance sliders in each of the colors—green, blue, and others. David demonstrates with these color sliders. The third of the color hacks is the Color Grading tool where you can adjust midtone, highlights, and shadows. David uses a warm tone in the highlights and cool tone in the shadows.

The fourth of the color hacks is the Tone Curve, where you can experiment with the graph to adjust the RGB or red, green, and blue tones in the highlights and shadows of your image. The idea is to experiment with these colors in your editing process. The fifth of the color hacks is the Calibration tool, where you find the red, green, and blue saturation sliders, which affect many of the other colors. David experiments with these sliders to show you how saturation affects the overall image.

After he has employed the five color hacks in his forest scene, David shows you the before and after images. The edited version is far superior. In this Premium video lesson, Outdoor Photography Guide’s pro photographer David Johnston shows you how color hacks can make subtle improvements to your photographs.