3 Ways to Color Grade in Lightroom, From Complementary Pairs to a Single Hue

Lightroom's Color Grading panel can change the mood of a photo with a few color wheels and a couple of sliders, yet a lot of edits come out heavy and unnatural because the colors were chosen at random. A small amount of color theory gives those wheels a direction, and that direction is what separates a deliberate look from a lucky accident.

The photographer behind TKNORTH opens with his own old Instagram edits, which he calls super heavy and super unnatural, and traces the fix to understanding why certain color combinations work. His starting point is the free Adobe Color wheel. You can upload any photo there, even a screenshot from a favorite film, and see which colors it holds and where each one falls on the wheel. He spends most of his time on complementary colors, the pairs directly opposite each other. He compares them to light and dark in a photo. Each one helps define the other, so placing them side by side makes both look stronger while the image still feels balanced. Once you know that, choosing a pair becomes a decision about the photo in front of you.

Before grading anything, he loads a completely black-and-white image into Lightroom so every change shows up clearly. The panel gives shadows, midtones, and highlights a wheel each, and a fourth global wheel tints the whole frame at once. Each wheel can be expanded by itself for precise work, or you can leave all three in view to compare how they interact. Luminance lightens or darkens the tint in each range, and he often drops the shadows a touch to add contrast while coloring them. Below the wheels sit two sliders that people tend to skip. Blending controls how much the three ranges overlap, and Balance shifts the dividing line between shadows and highlights. Together they decide how much of the image picks up each color.

Mixed light, such as tungsten bulbs or sodium vapor street lamps against a blue dusk sky, hands you a warm and cool pairing before you open Lightroom. That pairing has been a staple of film color work since digital grading took over Hollywood in the early 2000s, with "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" often cited as the first feature graded entirely on a computer. Part of its appeal comes down to skin. Most skin tones fall in the orange range, so cooling the shadows and background helps people separate from their surroundings without any extra masking. Lightroom's panel borrows the three-way wheel layout colorists use in tools like DaVinci Resolve. Adobe introduced it in October 2020 to replace the old Split Toning panel, which only offered controls for highlights and shadows. If you start paying attention to mixed light while you shoot, you give the grade an existing contrast to build on.

His first edit is a night street frame where warm street lamps meet cool ambient light, so the opposing pair is already in the scene. He pulls the shadows toward blue and a little aqua, pushes the highlights toward red, and gives the midtones only a faint touch of red. Because the frame runs so warm, he adds a bit of blue through the global wheel. Then he darkens the shadows, lifts the highlights, and nudges Balance toward the shadows. The result leans a little too red, so a quick hue shift in the Color Mixer pulls those reds toward orange. A daylight frame gets similar treatment. It already carries some blue and orange, so the grade pushes what the scene offered instead of imposing a look on it.

Complementary pairs are one of three approaches he works through. A third image swaps blue and orange for green and magenta, using colors the flowers and foliage already supply. In that edit, he tames a blue sky so it stops competing with the main pair. He then moves to quieter analogous grades, built from colors sitting next to each other on the wheel, which suit soft light and calm scenes. Much of his own work lives here, in cooler, moodier grades that stay within the blue family. On a softly lit frame that already runs cool, he adds blue to the shadows, midtones, and highlights, nudges the highlights slightly toward purple, and shifts Balance toward the highlights. From there, he pushes a warm image far enough that it edges into a monochromatic grade built around a single hue. The global wheel alone can do that in one move, but he picks slightly different shades of orange for the shadows and highlights so he can still set their luminance and balance separately.

None of these are strict rules, he says, just directions for when you need one. If you're stuck, load a photo you admire into Adobe Color, or build on the colors already in your frame. He also encourages pushing an edit too far while you experiment, as long as you know what you're aiming for, because that's how experimentation turns into intuition.

Each of the five edits ends with a before-and-after comparison in the video, so you can judge for yourself how far each grade moved the original.