Photography is beyond picking up a camera to shoot, it’s always about the final product, the outcome, which leads to that magnificent image you see.
Colour grading is a process of adding and subtracting colours of a photograph, it is also a process that photographers use to change the visual tone or colour effect of an image. Better still, it is used to manipulate the colours of a photograph. Once colour grading is applied, the aesthetics of an image will completely change.
A lot of people including photographers confuse colour grading with colour correction. They are both different in many ways. Colour correction is correcting and adjusting several aspects of an image to make it more beautiful. When it comes to colour correction, it’s all about adjusting the white balance, highlight, contrast, noise, and exposure. While colour grading involves adjusting the hue, curves, levels, and colour fill.
There are two major colour grading editing software: Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop but this is not to say that there are no other editing software.
Below is a tutorial video by Sean Tucker on how to use hue, curves, contrast, etc, to colour grade.
Video Source: Youtube
