Colour grading photos on a phone

Bottom line up front: colour grading photos on a phone made easy, thanks to Adobe

Colour grading in photography might sound like an expert specialist technical skill. Good news: it’s easy. Photographer, graphic designer, and Unsplash guru Mike Hindle inspired me to create a blue monochrome look in Lightroom using simple colour grading. In fact, it works for any colour story you want.

Since Adobe makes Lightroom available on mobile phones and tablets, you have the option of an entirely mobile workflow: use the phone to take the picture, edit in Lightroom mobile, and share on whatever platform(s) you choose.

(I know a lot of folks have a love/hate thing with Adobe. I don’t mind paying them a subscription fee to use their products. But that’s not an issue with Adobe’s Lightroom mobile app: it’s free!)

Colour grading vs colour correction vs colour story

Colour grading in photography is the process of styling hue and saturation in shadows, midtones, and highlights to achieve a mood or look. Photographers and other media creators use it to achieve a specific style across an image or film.

Colour correction adjusts colour to ensure colour appears consistently across an image or all frames. It corrects colour distortions that can occur due to the equipment or media used to capture an image or frames. It should be done before colour grading so you start stylising from a corrected consistent basis.

A colour story uses colour to tell a story. Every colour and hue affects our perceptions and emotions. Choosing the right colour(s) helps convey whatever you want a viewer to feel and understand about an image or video.

A standard workflow using all three concepts is:

1. Colour story: what are you trying to convey, and what colours/hues will support it?
2. Colour correction: make sure colour across your image/frames is correct and consistent.
3. Colour grading: stylise your image/frames to tell the story.

You could colour correct first, of course. But colour editing often comes after composition and other editorial changes, because you’ll want to know what story you’re telling during those edits.

Why use colour grading to create a monochrome look?

Because it offers much more flexibility in styling an image. You can use subtle shades of a dominant colour to guide the eye, and give a monochrome image an enhanced emotional impact. For example, blue tones suit winter scenes. Sepias can feel nostalgic, elegaic. Experimenting with different hues and tones can reveal unexpected depths to an image, beyond shades of grey.

Here’s a before and after example of one of my hunters’ blinds images comparing a crude overall colour style vs colour grading:

In the before image, I converted to black and white then applied a pale coolish filter. In the after image, I used colour grading to apply a blue monochrome style. And colour grading in Lightroom (or Camera Raw as a smart filter in Photoshop, same thing because they both use the same developing/processing engine) allows me to grade colour selectively with luminosity masks, which I did for the bright tree, and dark foreground field, and the background forest, all separately in addition to a global colour styling. (Masking is a lot easier in Lightroom desktop.)

I like both versions. Perhaps the after image is a bit too strong (easily fixed), although it’s closer to my original intent of brighter icy trees and darker shadows, with a cold winter feel.

Nevertheless, colour grading delivered a more dramatic version quickly and flexibly.

A tip I stumbled across in the Colour Grading panel

By default, the Colour Grading panel shows all three colour wheels: midtones, shadows, and highlights. But if you click on one of the corresponding icons above the wheels, you can adjust them in bigger size.

I found the small colour wheels fiddly to fine tune. The larger versions on the other hand are much easier to control. Hover over the icons in the “Adjust” list to see tooltips that identify them if they’re not obvious to you.

Why colour grade photos on a phone vs desktop?

You’d probably colour grade photos on a phone only occasionally. Quick social media posts on the go—when the image is a casual take—will benefit from enhancements in the Lightroom mobile toolset.

Fine art, portraiture, and other higher quality images will need the larger screen size for easier masking and other finer tuned adjustments you can only do in a desktop environment—if only because the larger screen size shows details in an image that a phone’s smaller screen will hide.

Colour grading photos on a phone isn’t for everyone or every image. Even so, what a great tool to turn to when you need it.

Conclusion

Before Mike Hindle’s heads up, I understood colour grading in principle, but didn’t know how to use it properly in practice. Now I have a solid practical understanding of how to use it in a specific scenario. I can build on that as I experiment, and you can too!

Colour grading in Lightroom is available for desktop, tablet, and mobile. You can develop an entirely phone-based workflow to develop your photos. You don’t even need Lightroom: the process works with any digital photo processing software that supports colour grading. I didn’t cop on to that mobile option until now.

Adobe has a good primer on how to edit photos in Lightroom mobile. It covers all editing options, including colour grading photos on a phone.

What do you think?

Do you have any questions or thoughts you want to share about mobile colour grading? Comment below!