Add Horror-Film like Color Grading with Adobe Photoshop | QE

For this photo I’m applying a dark, moody blue look with subtle glow and strongly desaturated colors. For the #edinting I will be using #Aobe #Photoshop CC 2021.

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0:00 Intro
I’ve been struggling a lot of this image, but finally decided to apply some kind of dark, horror-film-like style on this foggy landscape photo. That means my goal was to add a strong, cold color cast, reduce the saturation a lot of bring down the brightness. Besides that, I added subtle glow in the brightest parts of the photo. I did the raw adjustments in the camera raw editor, used Photoshop to clean up the photo and apply the glow and finished the editing using the Nik Collection plug in. I know this does not look natural at all, but that usually isn’t something I go for with my photos :-)

0:41 1. Basic Adjustments
I started with the lens corrections, then switched the camera profile to Adobe Standard. For the cold look I simply dropped the white balance temperature until I was satisfied. Since this results in strange colors (orange in the trees and greens in the grass) I dropped the vibrance to lessen the saturation. By decreasing the exposure, I darkened the photo and to keep some contrast and highlights I pushed the whites a little.

2:57 2. Local Adjustments
First, I placed a graduated filter over the foreground and added clarity to give the road some more detail. Next, I wanted to desaturate the dark parts of the photo, so I applied a graduated filter over the whole photo, defined a luminosity range mask for the darkest parts and here simply dropped the saturation.

To slightly brighten up the center and add more haze in there I added a radial filter and used negative dehaze.

4:56 3. Further Color Grading
In the saturation tab I dropped the orange, green and aqua saturation. For the split toning I simply added a cold color to the shadows.

5:46 4. Photoshop
With the spot healing brush I removed distracting object. Then, I added a new layer with the blending mode set to hard light and used a bright, blue-ish brush to add subtle glow over the highlights. Finally, I used the Nik Collection plug in to add a little more glow using the glamour glow filter.