Lights and light bulbs are mainly chosen based on their light intensity or color temperature. There are many types of lights on the market. For creative professions, color fidelity is very important. If you haven’t paid much attention to color fidelity until now, you may be surprised to learn that there is a visible difference between different lights and how people and objects look under them.

Photographers well-versed in photography terminology are certainly familiar with the term white balance. However, white balance is not the only factor to consider when discussing light. You can also measure how well a light source displays different colors compared to natural light. This type of measurement is useful for photography as well as other color work, whether it’s painting or putting on makeup.

Don’t let the title scare you, there’s no need to purchase expensive equipment. You can create your own display profile using calibration hardware that can be easily rented. Whether it’s for the internet or for printing, calibration hardware can help you get more accurate colors in your photos in the future.   

A photographer may be able to edit world-class photos, but if their monitor alters the way certain colors look, the result will be far from desirable. Even if the user doesn’t see this, others will. Fortunately, there are ways to calibrate your monitor to go from color approximations to accurate results.

Almost everyone who’s spent more than a little time with a camera shoots to RAW. After all, RAW lets you make bad photos average, average photos excellent, and excellent photos even better. That’s because it offers significantly more image data than, for example, JPG. And thanks to this it gives you room for much better edits. So let’s take a look at how to work with it.

Selective color consists of desaturating some colors in your photo. In the past, it was a very popular edit, especially in its extreme form where one object (such as a red rose or yellow taxi) remains in color and the rest of the photo is black-and-white. Let’s learn how to do this edit, as well as its less-dramatic version, which plenty of photographers use to subtly emphasize the main subject.

After already looking at the theory and some examples of color grading as seen in film production, we now focus on the practice. We’ll show you how you can easily create various color tint combinations in Zoner Photo Studio X, recharging your portrait and landscape photography. Specifically, we’ll demonstrate how to create the popular Teal & Orange look. We’ll go through each edit step-by-step so you can skillfully do it with your own photographs.   

How can you as a photographer take inspiration from color toning in movies? We’ll use the examples of four famous movies to show you different styles of color grading. As you’ll see, colors have a fundamental impact on how we see movies. We’ll be looking at legends such as Saving Private Ryan, The Godfather, and The Matrix. Have you ever thought about the roles that color palettes play in them?

You’ve probably noticed the various popular photo styles, presets, and filters out there that give photos a retro look—as if you’d peeled them out of an old, dusty album. We’re fans of these too, and you’ll find some among our presets. You can encounter this vintage look not only in portraits and reportage, but in landscape photos too. But why do some people give fresh green landscapes an autumnal, parched look, like after a drought?

Presets make photo editing go faster. Because they can apply several of your frequently used operations at once. Presets keep you from having to set the same sliders to the same values again and again; it all just takes one click. The built-in presets aren’t a good fit for you? No problem. Zoner Photo Studio offers an easy way to create your own. It will save you work, and you’ll get to keep your own original editing style.