What Is Photo Color Grading?
Color grading is the process of applying a stylistic colour treatment to your photographs to achieve a desired mood or aesthetic. It is distinct from colour correction, which is the technical process of making an image look accurate and natural. Grading is creative; correction is technical. Great post-processing typically involves both.
Color Correction First
Before grading, you must correct. Colour correction means:
- Setting white balance so neutral tones look neutral
- Adjusting exposure so highlights and shadows fall within a usable range
- Correcting for lens chromatic aberration
- Normalising skin tones to a believable base
Skipping correction and jumping straight to grading builds your look on a broken foundation. The same grade will look completely different applied to a correctly balanced image versus an image with a colour cast.
Understanding the Colour Wheel and Tonal Ranges
Colour grading tools split the image into tonal ranges: shadows, midtones, and highlights. Adjusting the colour in each range independently gives you precise control. A classic cinematic look shifts shadows toward teal and highlights toward warm amber. A faded film look lifts the blacks and desaturates the midtones.
Common Grading Techniques
Split Toning
Split toning applies different hue shifts to shadows and highlights. Warm highlights and cool shadows create a complementary contrast that feels professional and polished. Most RAW editors including darktable support split toning directly in their colour tools.
HSL Adjustments
Hue, Saturation, and Luminance controls allow targeted adjustments to specific colour ranges. Pulling down the saturation of a specific yellow range while boosting its luminance can make green foliage look more vibrant without affecting skin tones.
Tone Curves
The tone curve is the most powerful colour grading tool available. An S-curve adds contrast. Pulling the blue channel curve down in the shadows and up in the highlights creates a classic warm-shadow, cool-highlight split. Learning to use curves fluently is the single biggest skill improvement available to editing photographers.
Building a Consistent Grade
Consistency across a shoot matters more than perfection on any individual image. Here is a workflow:
- Cull your images first using imagic so you are only grading your selects
- Pick one representative image from the shoot as your reference frame
- Build your grade on that reference image
- Copy and paste those adjustments to the rest of the shoot
- Fine-tune individual images that deviate from the reference lighting
Tools for Color Grading
darktable has powerful colour grading modules including colour balance RGB, tone equalizer, and film simulation. It is free and handles all major RAW formats.
RawTherapee offers extensive colour management via Lab adjustments and colour toning tools. imagic users can send their culled selects directly to RawTherapee for final colour work.
For photographers using imagic's five-step workflow (Import, Analyse, Review, Cull, Export), colour grading happens after the Cull step, in your chosen RAW editor. By the time you begin grading, you have already removed all the technically inferior frames, so your grading work is focused only on images worth the effort.
Saving and Reusing Grades
Save your finished grade as a preset in your RAW editor. Over time you will build a library of looks — one for golden hour outdoor portraits, one for indoor flash work, one for moody landscape processing. Applying a starting preset and making minor tweaks is far faster than building each grade from scratch.