Cinematic edits
How to give your colours, tones and composition a cinematic makeover
There are many ways we can use Lightroom on our iPhone or iPad to give a photo a more cinematic look. We could simply slap a preset on to our image to change its colours and tones but this runs the risk of making our processed shot look just like one produced by other Lightroom users.
Movie makers use a process called grading to change the tone, hue and saturation of a shot’s colours to give them a more striking appearance, such as accentuating the green hue of an cityscape’s neon lights for example.
By using Lightroom’s powerful colour grading tools, we can target specific tonal ranges (such as shadows or highlights) and change the hue and saturation of the colours in these areas. This manual grading process creates far more distinctive and unique looking images than those produced by one-tap presets.
We’ll also show you how to give your shots cinematic properties such as clumps of film grain, as well as changing their composition to add widescreen letterbox bars that evoke the big screen experience.
EXPLAINED… How to grade using colour wheels
Adjust the colours in a specific tonal range by tapping on the Shadow, Midtone or Highlight icons.
We’ve dragged the sampler inside a colour wheel to adjust the Hue and Saturation of the midtones.
Drag left to adjust the shadow colours. Drag right to bias the colour changes towards the highlights.
Use the Crop tools 16:9 aspect ratio too give your graded shots a cinematic widescreen proportion.
HOW TO Get a cinematic look
Browse to a shot in Lightroom. In the Edit panel tap to toggle open the Color label to access its tools. Drag the Vibrance slider right to boost the saturation of weaker colours without oversaturating stronger ones.
Tap on the Color Grading button. Tap to choose the Shadows colour wheel. Drag inside the Shadows colour wheel to change the Hue to 335 and the Saturation to 100. This adds a neon pink hue to the image’s darkest areas.
