How to Pastel COLOR GRADING in Photoshop

Learn how to apply Pastel Color Grading with #Photoshop in this Editing Tutorial

If you want to follow along feel free to download the raw photo here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zrVS...

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0:00 Intro
For this photo I wanted to restore the warmth of the sunset and apply some pastel color grading on it while keeping the whole image on the brighter side. For the post processing I mostly used Photoshops Camera Raw Editor, while I finished the editing in Photoshop itself.

0:19 1. Basic Adjustments
I started by changing the profile to Adobe Landscape for more base saturation. Next, I adjusted the white balance by increasing the temperature and thus just warming up the whole scene a bit. The raw photo is rather dark, to fix that, I brought up the exposure, the shadows and the blacks. Due to this I lost a bit of details in the sky, so to counter that, I dropped the highlights. Finally, I added vibrance and saturation for stronger colors.

2:17 2. Masking
First, I added a linear gradient over the sky and dropped the exposure to reveal more details of the clouds. Then, I added a color range mask targeting only the blue tones (in the sky) and again dropped the exposure. This will add contrast between the sky and the clouds. For the foreground I added another linear gradient and slightly dropped the exposure to create some kind of vignetting effect. For glow coming in from the left, I used two differently sized radial gradients and increased the blacks / dropped the dehaze on them.

5:27 3. Color Grading
First, I worked my way through the HSL panel. I started by dropping the orange and yellow tones making the clouds just slightly more red. In the saturation tab, I increased the red tones while dropping orange, yellow, green and blue. Finally, I added split toning to make the colors pop. Here, I used a warm tone with a ton of saturation on the highlights, a warm tone on the mid tones and a cold tone to add some color contrast on the shadows. I enhanced the colors some more in the calibration tab, by bringing down the blue primary hue and increasing its saturation.

8:12 4. Photoshop
Here, I mostly cleaned up the scene with the spot healing and clone stamp tool. For some extra glow I used the brush on a soft light layer and carefully brushed in some more glow coming in from the left. Some final color grading was done using a gradient map adjustment layer(think of it like split toning in the ACR) and the photo filter adjustment layer