Using color.adobe.com while editing photos in Lr

What you’ve said helps clear things up a little. It sounds like you want some simple steps, and might have thought that Adobe Color could help. But first, we should get one thing out of the way: It is not common for Adobe Color to be used in photo editing. It‘s used as a color palette tool for graphic design, in apps such as Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and (when used for design, not photography) Photoshop. For example, a designer would use Adobe Color to work out a standard color palette to apply across an advertising campaign for a brand, or for the production design of a TV show or movie.

But you’re asking more about basic photo editing, and for that, we should review how Lightroom is intended to be used for that. We shoot similar subjects like travel photography, so my example below uses an image I shot on a trip. First, a before/after: I edited it to bring out more details in the highlights and shadows, and to shift the colors to the warm side of the color wheel.

_DSC1658-Before-After.jpg

The most basic way to get there in Lightroom is to follow these three overall steps:

1. Choose a profile. A raw profile sets the starting point for the more specific settings that you apply. I am finding that the new, intelligent Adaptive Color profile fixes a lot of contrast problems right away, like a really smart Auto button. I like it because it usually reduces the number of steps I have to do later. If it goes too far, reduce the Amount slider. Or choose another profile like Adobe Color or Adobe Landscape if those look better to you.

(The colors in the demo are a little rough-looking because they’re GIF animations.)

Lightroom 9 1 Profiles.gif

2. Adjust options in the Light panel. My example covers such a wide tonal range that I want to lower Highlights and raise Shadows a bit more. (Note: In step 1, if you chose a profile that does not have Adaptive in the name, here you can try clicking the Auto button at the top and see if you like what it does.)

Lightroom 9 2 Basic.gif

3. Adjust options in the Color panel. The White Balance settings (Temp and Tint) shift colors along the warm/cool (yellow/blue) axis and green/magenta axis of the color wheel, respectively. You see me first try the White Balance presets because they are common lighting conditions.

Lightroom 9 3 Color.gif

That’s a good way to start.

The other color panels you see, such as Color Mixer, Point Color, and Color Grading, are advanced tools for making more specialized adjustments that can be based on color theory. For example, if you wanted to generally shift image colors around the color wheel, you could use the Color Grading panel, which works in a way that’s familiar to professional colorists who color-grade major TV/cinema productions.

It’s often used to independently shift the major tonal ranges (highlights, midtones, and shadows), to achieve effects like the example described in the tool tip in the screen shot below: Warming up highlights and cooling down shadows is a color contrast technique used at least as far back as Renaissance painting. 

Lightroom-Color-Grading.jpg

There is a way to convert an Adobe Color theme to a raw profile that can be applied in Lightroom, but it’s complicated, involving two more applications, and not easily understandable by beginners. I can post that, but first…that is not a common way to edit in Lightroom, so first, to make sure we’re solving the right problem we should back up a lot and ask:

What are you trying to accomplish? Do you simply want to apply consistent color edits across a number of images in Lightroom, or do you specifically need to apply a LUT-like color palette of the type that Adobe Color can produce?

Because if all you want is to apply the current image’s color edits to other raw/DNG images, there are much easier and faster ways to do it without leaving Lightroom, and they would be much more flexible for further image-specific edits.