How to do it, step by step
- Crop first Cropping changes how much bright and dark area is in the frame, so it changes what a correct exposure and a correct grade even look like. Do it before anything else.
- Set exposure honestly Brighten until the subject is properly lit. Most photos people describe as dull or muddy are simply a third of a stop dark, and colour cannot fix that.
- Fix white balance until skin looks like skin Use the eyedropper on something that should be neutral, then adjust temperature by eye. Grading before this step means you are correcting a cast with a style.
- Pick one direction and make two moves Shadows one way, highlights the other, or everything toward a single hue. Stop after two. A third move is usually undoing the first.
- Check skin and back out of anything that moved it If faces have shifted toward orange, pink or grey, reduce the move that did it rather than adding a correction on top.
- Fade the whole thing by a quarter Whatever you have built, reduce it slightly. A grade should be felt rather than named, and the version that looks right while you are editing is nearly always a step too strong.
Grading is the fourth thing you do
Colour grading has a reputation for being technical, and most of that comes from people attempting it in the wrong order. A grade applied to a photo that is under-exposed and orange is not a grade, it is a second cast on top of the first.
Three things come first, and all three are corrections rather than choices. Crop, because the frame decides what the photo is. Exposure, because a photo that is slightly dark reads as muddy and everyone responds to that by adding warmth instead of adding light. White balance, because skin lit by a warm bulb is orange and nothing downstream will fix it.
Only when the photograph is honest do you get to make a decision about how it should feel, and that decision is the grade. The difference is worth holding on to: correction makes the photo look like what was in front of you, grading makes it look like what you want. If the whole order is what you are after, how to edit aesthetic photos walks through all five stages.
The grade itself is short. Two moves and a fade, ninety seconds at most. If you are still pushing colour sliders after five minutes, the problem is upstream.
Three grades that cover most photos
You do not need a palette theory. Three directions cover nearly everything people actually want, and each is two moves.
| The feeling | Shadows | Highlights | Then | Where it suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warm and filmic | Push toward orange or olive, gently | Leave neutral or barely warm | Lift the blacks a little, drop saturation a touch | Daylight, golden hour, anything with people in it |
| Cool and clean | Push toward blue | Keep neutral, or the faintest warmth | Reduce saturation slightly, keep contrast honest | Overcast days, city photos, interiors with hard light |
| Faded and soft | One quiet hue, usually warm | Pull the whites down a little | Lift blacks noticeably, reduce contrast | Indoor evenings, quiet photos, anything meant to feel like a memory |
The first is the one most people mean when they say a photo looks like film. The second is what most editorial and travel photography does. The third is what most vintage presets are, once you take the grain off.
Notice that none of them says raise saturation. Increasing saturation is the most tempting move on a phone and the one that most reliably makes a photo look untreated rather than graded, because it pushes skin along with the sky.
Which slider does what, in plain words
Four controls cover all of it, and phone editors give them different names for the same thing.
Temperature and tint. Temperature runs blue to yellow, tint runs green to magenta. Together they set what the photo calls white. This is correction, not grading, but it is the most powerful colour control on the phone and it is the one people under-use.
The colour mixer, sometimes called HSL. Eight colour channels, each with three controls. Hue nudges a colour toward its neighbours, saturation makes it stronger or weaker, luminance makes it lighter or darker. This is where you handle one colour without touching the rest: pulling blue's luminance down darkens a sky and leaves everybody's face alone.
Colour grading, sometimes called split toning. Separate colour controls for shadows, midtones and highlights. This is the panel that does the actual grading work, and it is the one that produces the classic look of cool shadows with warm light.
The tone curve. Lifting the bottom left point of the curve is how you fade a photo, and it is the single most useful thing the curve does. Everything else it offers is optional at this level.
All four are in Lightroom's free tier. Snapseed has the equivalents spread across its Tune Image, White Balance and Curves tools. Apple Photos has temperature, tint and a single saturation control, which is enough for the corrections but not enough for a real grade.
Protect skin and the photo survives anything
If there is a person in the photograph, skin is the constraint that every other decision has to fit around. Viewers have an extremely good instinct for what skin should look like and no instinct at all for what a wall should look like, which is why an unnatural face ruins a photo that an unnatural sky would not.
Skin lives in the orange channel of the colour mixer, with some of it spilling into red and yellow. That means anything you do to orange happens to every face in the frame. A small reduction in orange saturation calms a face that has gone too strong. A small increase in orange luminance brightens skin without brightening the whole photo. Both are useful. Shifting orange's hue is almost never useful, because it is the fastest way to make somebody look unwell.
When you grade the shadows, skin gets some of it too, since the shaded side of a face is a shadow. That is why heavy blue shadows look cinematic on a landscape and cold on a portrait. The workaround is to keep the shadow move small on photos with people, and put the character into the highlights instead.
Two checks before you call a grade finished. Look at the whites of eyes and teeth, which should stay close to neutral. And look at the palms and the inner forearm, which are lighter than the rest and show a cast first. The specific case where this goes wrong most often has its own page: fixing orange skin tone.
Grading more than one photo
A grade matters far more across a set than on a single photo, because a carousel where every frame leans a different way reads as unedited no matter how good each one is.
The method is simple and the order is the whole trick. Correct each photo individually first, which means white balance and exposure per frame, because those differ from photo to photo. Only then apply the same grade to all of them. Do it the other way round and you have applied one colour decision to four different casts, and you get four different results.
In Lightroom that is Copy Settings with white balance and crop unticked, then Paste Settings across the rest. Snapseed can copy and paste a full edit stack. Apple Photos has Copy Edits and Paste Edits. All three are free.
Afterwards, look at the set as a grid rather than one at a time. The one photo that jumps out will almost always be a white balance problem rather than a grading problem, and it takes ten seconds to nudge. The longer version of this workflow, including what to do when photos came from two different phones, is in making your photos look consistent.
Checking a grade before you post it
Four checks, and none takes more than a few seconds.
- Toggle the original. Every editor has a before and after. If the before looks better, that is information, not an insult.
- Look at it on another screen. Phone screens are bright, contrasty and often warm-shifted, and a grade built on one can look heavy on a laptop. If you only ever post to phones this matters less.
- Turn the brightness down. A grade that only works at full screen brightness is too subtle, and one that becomes muddy at half brightness has crushed shadows.
- Come back in the morning. The single most reliable test. The grade that felt bold at midnight is usually one step too far, and you will see it instantly the next day.
Once a grade has passed those four times in a row, save it as a preset and stop rebuilding it from scratch. Making your own filter covers how, and what to leave out of the saved version.
Questions people ask
How do you start color grading photos on phone?
Crop, set exposure, then correct white balance so skin looks right. Only then pick one direction, usually warm shadows with neutral highlights, and make two moves. Fade the result slightly. Lightroom's free tier and Snapseed both have the controls needed.
What is the difference between colour correction and colour grading?
Correction makes the photo look like what was actually in front of you: right brightness, right white balance. Grading is a choice about how it should feel, applied afterwards. Grading before correcting means styling a photo that still has a cast on it.
Which free app is best for colour grading on a phone?
Lightroom's free tier, because it includes the colour mixer, the colour grading panel and the tone curve. Snapseed is the best alternative with nothing gated at all. Apple Photos handles temperature and tint but has no real grading panel.
How do I stop a grade from ruining skin tones?
Keep your shadow move small when people are in the frame and put the character in the highlights instead. Skin sits in the orange channel of the colour mixer, so adjust its saturation or luminance if needed, but leave its hue alone.
How many adjustments should a grade have?
Two, plus a fade. Most photos that look over-edited are not the result of one heavy move but of six small ones stacked on each other, each added to compensate for the last.