In colour grading for film and television, there is an age-old technique that is often used to make your footage look more cinematic or film like. The trick is to desaturate the shadow parts of an image. In fact, old versions of Final Cut (before FCPX) even had a specific plug-in for doing this called “desaturate lows”. In most modern colour grading and video editing tools, you have tools which let you control the saturation directly in relation to the brightness values in a scene, but in Lightroom, and other photo editing tools, this is one of the few tools you don’t have. Or do you?

It used to be very tricky to do this in Lightroom, but with some of the more recent updates, it’s now much easier to achieve. OK, so this tutorial is super-specific and nerdy, but bear with me, as the technique is somewhat useful.

One example of this in real world that I’ve noticed is with Fuji cameras and some of the Fuji Film Simulation profiles. If you compare Provia to ProNeg-Hi you will see that they’re reasonably similar, but the darker colours in ProNeg are desaturated by comparison. This is this technique in action on a colour profile.

(Side note, see here for a trick on how to make your own version of Fuji’s film simulation profiles)

As there’s no direct control for reducing saturation in just the shadow areas, you need to make your own. This is where Lightroom’s new masking tools come in.

All you have to do is create a new Luminance mask layer and then set it so that it masks only the shadow areas. It should look something like this.

You can tweak this to suit your need, but it should be something like this. For a realistic look, the effect should be subtle. You don’t want to totally desaturate the low end so that it goes grey. It should still have a little colour in it.

Now, you can adjust the saturation on the masked layer, and this will only affect the shadow areas. You want to avoid doing it too much, and the result should be fairly subtle, but it can add to an interesting effect.

You can actually add this to a preset too. Just make sure to add the mask when saving the preset. It’s probably best to rename it too so as not to forget what it is!

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