Today’s Question: Can you explain how you apply color balance adjustments using the Tone Curve in Lightroom Classic?
Tim’s Quick Answer: To apply color balance adjustments with the Tone Curve adjustment in Lightroom Classic you choose an individual color channel (Red, Green or Blue) and apply a curve that shifts the balance of color. That curve can be rather sophisticated to provide a different shift in the shadows, midtones, and highlights, for example.
More Detail: Today’s question is a follow-up from yesterday’s answer, where I mentioned that while I don’t use the Tone Curve adjustment in Lightroom Classic very often, it can be very helpful when I need to apply a sophisticated fine-tuning of the balance of colors in an image.
To get started, go to the Tone Curve adjustment and from the Adjust option at the top of the controls choose either the Red, Green, or Blue channel. Red controls the balance between red and cyan, Green controls the balance between green and magenta, and Blue controls the balance between blue and yellow.
For a very general color balance adjustment you could simply click to add an anchor point at the center of the curve line and then drag upward to shift the balance of colors toward the color represented by the channel, or downward to shift toward the opposite color.
However, the real power of using the Tone Curve adjustment to refine color balance is the ability to apply a variable effect for the shadows versus the highlights, for example. You could drag an anchor point downward toward the dark (left) end of the curve for the Blue channel to shift the color in the shadows toward yellow, for example. You could then drag an anchor point upward toward the bright (right) end of the curve to shift the highlights toward blue.
By creating more sophisticated shapes for the curve for each channel following the principles outlined above, you can shift the balance of colors in an image in very sophisticated ways. This can be very helpful, for example, when working on a photo that has challenging color due to a blend of various light sources, such as when there is natural light along with incandescent and fluorescent lights in the same scene.
