Photoshop's Camera Raw filter is genuinely one of the most underused tools for color grading, and most people treat it like a raw file converter rather than a full editing engine. If you've been doing your color work purely in curves or Hue/Saturation, you're leaving a lot of control on the table.
Coming to you from PiXimperfect, this detailed video from Unmesh Dinda walks through a two-step approach to color grading inside Photoshop using the Camera Raw filter as the primary engine. The first step is about separation: brightening your subject and darkening the background using Camera Raw's masking tools, which automatically detect and isolate the subject or background with a single click. From there, Dinda adjusts exposure and blacks on the subject mask, then pulls the background exposure down separately. The result is immediate and striking, and the before-and-after comparison makes the impact hard to ignore.
The second step is color grading, and this is where Camera Raw earns its reputation. The color grading section inside Camera Raw lets you assign distinct colors to highlights, midtones, and shadows independently, with precise control over hue, amount, and luminosity for each range. Dinda uses a warm yellow in the highlights, a subtle red in the midtones, and a cooler blue-purple in the shadows to create a color grade with real depth. The blending slider between the tonal ranges is easy to overlook, but it controls how smoothly those colors transition into each other, and getting that right is the difference between a color grade that looks intentional and one that looks chaotic.
The video then goes further with a second, more cinematic example where Dinda builds a dark, faded film look using Camera Raw's curve controls, including the individual RGB channels, to introduce yellow into the highlights by pulling down the blue curve. He also shows how to add grain and a hard-edged vignette inside Camera Raw's effects panel to push the image toward an old-photo aesthetic. One genuinely useful technique is the double-masking approach he uses in Photoshop itself: grouping a curves adjustment layer and applying a gradient mask to the group, which lets him control sky brightness without disturbing the subject selection mask. There's also a light leak built from a radial gradient layer set to Screen blend mode, with its opacity controlled through a copied mask and the mask's density slider rather than the layer opacity.
If you want to see how all of these pieces come together into a complete, cinematic edit with real-world tradeoffs and decision-making shown in full, check out the video above for the full rundown from Dinda.
No comments yet