bts | Fairytale Colors -Lightroom Color-Grading Tutorial
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-This particular picture is of my girlfriend -we were setting up for a session and I caught a behind the scenes shot. I wrote some poetry to it too.
"all fairytales have darkness -what would there be to triumph, if not yourself? And at the door awaits, your princess...a true fairytale"
The picture signifies hope to me, where the hero is so tired, he cannot take another step. And as he looks up at the door he has been so furiously looking for, stands his princess. In defeating himself, he found true love. And I believe that to be true of relationships -most of the time we blame the other for the true turmoil within.
When editing this image, I took a few things into consideration. Immediately, I wanted a fairytale look, so I pushed the blacks up 20+. I noticed that I loved the green's and didn't want to loose their tonal values so I added rusty orange in the highlights and an blue/purple to the shadows, preserving beautiful green's while juxtaposed to the yellow, seen in the tree. The numeric values for Lightroom are seen below:
In the original image (below), you can see true white. The colors are amazing. But my artistry looks for color synergy and filmic processing.
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I decreased the vibrance to get rid of warm color tones and boosted the saturation to still get a saturated look, a lot like a muted painting. This image comes together because the colors chosen are complimentary not only to one another but also to the scene, hence the reason they cannot be a preset unless the colors found in the original photo are the colors in your image. So what's the point of this post? Well it's so that the community can see that color grading is a very complicated process, one which takes years to develop. It's as unique as you, you could say. So I just am posting about my theories of color and how I use them to evoke a certain emotion.
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What're your thoughts? What colors do you guys tend to split-tone? Let's start a discussion below on the power of editing and whether or not it's necessary for each image.