How to: ORANGE & TEAL COLOR GRADING with Photoshop

Here is how you create the Orange and Teal Color Grading effect for your next nighttime photos with #photoshop

You can follow along this #Photoshoptutorial by downloading the raw photo here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RK03...

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Thank you for watching my video!
► http://www.the-phlog.com
► Patreon:   / phlog  
► Instagram:   / thephlog  
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

0:00 Intro
I rarely edit heavily orange and teal color graded photos, but for nighttime photos like this I think it looks awesome. But I also didn’t go too crazy on the teal color for the sky or the shadows. I set most of this color grading style up in the camera raw editor, while I used Photoshop to enhance the contrast and colors some more (and also stretch the mountains in the back a bit).

0:26 1. Basic Adjustments
I started by changing the Profile to Adobe Landscape for more saturation. Then, I adjusted the white balance by increasing the temperature (I wanted to start with a neutral looking image, so I didn’t go too crazy here). To get back details from the shadows, I pushed the exposure to brighten up the whole show. At the same time I brought down the highlights to prevent heavy overexposure. Then, I dropped the shadows for contrast and added vibrance for more saturation.

2:40 2. Masking
I started with a linear gradient over the whole sky. As it was a bit too bright for me, I brought down the exposure here. I added a radial gradient over the bright spot in the sky and dropped the highlights to reduce brightness. Also, I added blacks and dropped the dehaze to add glow to this spot. Then, I used another, smaller linear gradient for the top part of the sky to bring down the exposure some more and create some kind of vignetting effect where it gets darker towards the edge.

Using a bigger radial gradient over the highway in the bottom foreground, I made it brighter by increasing the whites and adding clarity. Finally, I used a linear gradient covering the whole landscape and increased the whites, while dropping the shadows for contrast.

5:50 3. Color Grading
Now for the orange teal color grading: In the hue tab, I brought down the orange and yellow hue slightly. Depending on how strong you want this effect to be you can of course bring it further down. Same goes for the blue hue: I dropped it very slightly, but for a strong teal tone, you want to drop it quite a lot!

For the saturation, I brought down the orange and yellow tones, while raising the aqua and blue colors. Finally, for the split toning I used an orange color for the highlights and applied a cold blue color for the midtones and shadows.

9:45 4. Photoshop
With the TK panel plug in I started dodging the midtones in the foreground to add contrast and brightness. This will lessen the saturation down there so I countered that with a selective color adjustment layer (just bringing back the orange saturation). For more contrast, I then dodged the shadows of the image (again using the TK panel to create a luminosity mask) in the sky. Finally, using the perspective warp tool I scaled up the mountains in the back.