Tint shadows, midtones and highlights

Color Grading gives each tonal range its own color. A warm tint in the highlights with cool shadows is a common starting point.

Grade a range

1. Open Color Grading in the right column. The All tab shows the three wheels together: shadows, midtones and highlights.
2. Drag the dot on a wheel. The angle is the hue and the distance from the center is how strong the tint is.
3. Drag the arc on the left of a wheel to set the tint’s saturation, and the arc on the right to set the range’s luminance: up to brighten that range, down to darken it.
4. To turn only the hue, drag the thin handle on the ring around the wheel. The strength stays.

The Shadows, Mids and Highlights tabs show one range at a time with a larger wheel. Changes show in both views. Hold Shift while dragging for fine steps, and double-click a wheel or an arc to reset it.

Decide where the ranges meet

Under the wheels, the Zones bar is a brightness scale from black to white. Its two keys mark where the shadows hand over to the midtones and where the midtones hand over to the highlights. Drag them to give a range more or less of the tones.

Blending sets how softly the ranges blend into each other. Low values make hard borders, and high values make a gradual blend. It starts at 50.

Start from a preset

The menu on the Color Grading header lists Teal & Orange, Warm Film, Cool Shadows, Bleach Bypass, Sepia, Cross Process and Cyan Noir. A preset replaces all the section’s values in one undo step. See effects and presets for saving your own.

Technical details: how a grade is applied

The wheel uses OkLCh hue, a color space where equal angles look like equal changes of hue, so the orange-red range gets more room than blue and purple. The tint is added in linear light. Luminance is a multiplication of lightness, up to 30 percent at either end, anchored at black. Raising a shadow range brightens the shadow detail without lifting the black point.

The ranges are found from perceived brightness (the same scale as the histogram), so the Zones keys line up with what you see on screen.