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Photography vocabulary · Editing & Retouching

Color grading

Meaning in photography, with examples

nounCommon term

In photography, color grading means: Adjusting the colors and tones of photos to create a particular mood or style, for example warm highlights with cool shadows.

In Turkish: renk düzenleme, renk derecelendirme, color grading

How it is used

Comes from film and video post-production and is now common in photo editing; Lightroom has a Color Grading panel. It is different from color correction, which fixes problems such as a wrong white balance before a creative look is added.

Example sentences

  1. The color grading gives the whole series a moody, cinematic feel.

  2. Fix the white balance first, then do the color grading.

Common collocations

  • cinematic color grading
  • color grading style
  • color correction
  • split toning
  • white balanceA setting that corrects for the color of the light so that white objects look white, not too orange under bulbs or too blue in the shade.
  • presetA saved group of editing settings that you can apply to many photos with one click to give them the same look.
  • saturationHow strong and intense the colors in an image are. Zero saturation gives black and white; very high saturation looks loud and unnatural.
  • editTo improve photos after the shoot by adjusting things like exposure, color and cropping, and to choose which images to keep.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Editing & Retouching

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