Create a Bright & Beautiful Color Grade in Photoshop

How to Create a Bright, Beautiful Color Grade in Photoshop

This Quick Tip builds a bright, complementary color grade using the Camera Raw Filter’s Color Grading panel, splitting cool and warm tones between the highlights and shadows without shifting skin color in the midtones.

Opening the Camera Raw Filter

The grade starts by going to Filter, then Camera Raw Filter, which applies Camera Raw’s full adjustment set as an editable filter layer on top of the image.

Raising Shadows to Recover Detail

Before any color work, the Shadows slider is raised to brighten the darker areas of the image and pull back detail that would otherwise stay hidden once the color grading is layered on top.

Why This Comes Before the Color Grade

Adding color to shadows that are still too dark makes that color much harder to see, so brightening the shadows first gives the orange tint added later somewhere to actually show up.

Using Color Grading to Shift Any Tone

Camera Raw’s Color Grading tool can shift the color of anything in the frame by targeting specific tonal ranges rather than the whole image at once. In this edit, the sky is shifted toward aqua, giving it a cooler, more saturated blue than it started with.

Coloring Highlights and Shadows Separately

The Color Grading panel splits its color controls between highlights and shadows, so each tonal range can be pushed toward a different hue, matching the color to what that part of the scene actually shows.

Aqua Highlights to Match the Sky

Aqua is added to the highlights to echo the sky’s new aqua tone, tying the brightest parts of the image to the color already established overhead.

Orange Shadows to Match the Ground

Orange is added to the shadows to reflect the tones in the ground, giving the darkest parts of the frame a warm counterpoint to the aqua highlights above and creating a complementary look between the two ends of the tonal range.

Keeping Midtones Warm to Protect Skin

With highlights pushed aqua and shadows pushed orange, the midtones are kept warm rather than shifted toward either color. Since skin tone generally falls in the midtone range, keeping that range warm and comparatively neutral is what stops the person in the photo from picking up an unwanted aqua or orange cast along with the background.

Lowering Opacity for a Subtle Effect

Once the grade is built, lowering the opacity of the Camera Raw Filter’s effect softens the overall intensity, pulling the highlights and shadows partway back toward their original colors for a more subtle, believable result than the full-strength grade.

More Free Photoshop Tutorials

• How to Color Grade in Photoshop Using Camera Raw
• Exploring Color Grading Presets in Camera Raw
• Dark and Moody Color Grading in Photoshop

Why This Technique Works

Splitting aqua and orange between highlights and shadows creates a complementary-color grade, one of the most reliable ways to make an image feel vivid and cinematic, without having to hand-paint color onto any part of the photo. Protecting the midtones is what keeps that same complementary contrast from turning the subject’s skin an unnatural color, which is usually the giveaway that a color grade has gone too far.

Final Thoughts

The Camera Raw Filter’s Color Grading panel makes it possible to build a full complementary color grade, aqua highlights, orange shadows, and protected warm midtones, entirely non-destructively, with opacity left as the final control for how strong the effect reads in the finished image.

Related Tutorials

• Color Grade in Photoshop: 4 Easy Steps With Camera Raw
• Color Grading in Photoshop: 4 Easy Cinematic Steps
• Color Grading Presets in Camera Raw: 4 Easy Steps