For the walkthrough, I’m going to be using Lightroom (*le gasp*)! Yup, this is my first ever all Lightroom tutorial! A recently goal of mine was to start using Lightroom more for my basic workflow. Now, mind you there are still a lot of things that I prefer or just need to be done with Photoshop still, so I’m not completely ditching PS.

So why do I say this a ‘Simple Color Shift’? Because at no point do I brush, or hand color anything – I simply shift a couple of sliders – which means I can create a preset as well as sync and batch edit my photos. This particular technique works best on big blocks of even color. If you want to do complicated color changes, covering a wide range of hues and custom colors, then that would probably be something that should be done in Photoshop.

Now for this tutorial, I’m going to be using a photo from a session I did with Waffles on what is suppose to be a sea green backdrop. I order all my seamless papers from a local Arizona company called Savage. I have a pamphlet with swatches of the paper of every color they offer and I feel in love with ‘Sea Green’. When it came in the mail, it was perfect, I put it up in my wall-mount, took a few photos and when I uploaded them they were all GOLD! No matter what I did – change the camera profile, tweaked the Camera Calibration, messed with the White Balance, tried natural light vs my speedlite – but the color was always a pee yellow. I suspect that short of using OFC and possibly gels, I am never going to get that ‘Sea Green’, straight out of camera.

Alrighty, here is the SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera) shot. As you can see, the seamless looks more pee-gold than Sea Green.

For the RAW edit, I up the Exposure, decrease the Shadows and the Blacks, add some Clarity, add some Saturation (of course), custom color the White Balance, add a touch of contrast with Curves and then top it off with a vignette. Oh, and I also used the Healing Tool to touch up the background and Waffle’s fur.

I now have a nice clean image, and even after I adjusted the White Balance, the background is still more yellow than green. Blerg.

Since I’m going to be color correcting with a certain color in mind, I went next door to my studio and tore off a piece of the seamless I wanted to color match. I scroll down to the HSL/Color/BW section of the Lightroom panel and click All (it’s just easier to have it all open when working with color – but then again, I have a huge screen to work with) and shift the Green Hue towards the blue green instead of yellow. It looked a bit washed out so I went down to Luminance and dragged it back.

Since this in an ongoing issue, I open the left handed panel and click + to create a new preset. Making sure that I only have the Color selection checked off, I name my new preset and I’m done!

For realsies, it is that easy! Make sure to stick around because I have a follow-up to this on creative uses and some more example photos that I’m going to post tomorrow.