I have been playing color grading games on the forum for several days in the past two days and gained a lot. The most profound thing I feel is: when encountering a color cast problem, don’t think it’s easy to adjust it, but don’t think it’s too complicated, especially after we have mastered more and more advanced color adjustment methods.
I'd like to take this beautiful woman's photo as an example.
Figure 1
At first, when I saw the strong color cast in this photo, I immediately thought of a channel mixer, which uses more complex channel operations. But after the adjustment, I feel that the effect is not satisfactory enough. Maybe it’s because I haven’t used it much before. Also tried neutral gray. But in the end, because I couldn’t find an accurate neutral gray point, the photo effect was very poor.
Later, when I looked at this photo carefully, I found that the most obvious feature of this photo is its reddish color. Therefore, I decided to abandon these color correction methods that I have been interested in recently, and start with the most basic color adjustment tool- the hue/saturation tool . Start by drastically reducing the red in the photo. This reduced the redness and found that the effect came out immediately.
Figure 2
Now, the most obvious thing about the photo is that the magenta is too saturated, so let's lower the magenta.
Figure 3
Now, the magenta in the photo is still oversaturated, but if I further adjust the saturation and brightness, the lower left door frame will appear mosaic, so I have to stop.
The complementary color of magenta is green. Since adjusting the magenta directly is not possible, then in turn, increase the saturation of the green to indirectly solve the problem of oversaturated magenta.
By adjusting the green saturation and brightness, we found that the color became more normal.
Figure 4
Because the yellow color in the clothes is too strong, the green clothes become not fresh and transparent enough. So, next, adjust the yellow color and change its hue.
Figure 5
Currently, the magenta color in the photo is still too heavy. But with hue and saturation adjustments, there’s not much room. Therefore, I decided to switch to the color balance tool and make further adjustments to the photo.
Figure 6
At this point, the color is basically normal.
If you want better results, you can continue to make further fine-tuning of the highlights and shadows. If you don’t like trouble, you can basically call it a day. This is my final rendering
Figure 7
After this method was posted, everyone gave it more recognition. This shows that sometimes abandoning some complicated methods and adjusting from the most basic methods can achieve better results.
You may ask: This process has never used information tools to determine the content, nor the neutral gray. Is the method scientific? I personally believe that since pictures are for people to see, the highest judge should and can only be our eyes. The modification of a photo actually represents the different personalities and aesthetic tastes of each of us. The same picture will appear in various ways in different hands. I said something in a post a few days ago: "Good things are basically selected, and color matching is basically done with eyes." Although it is a joke, it is also a personal opinion. Whether it is true or not, please leave a comment below.