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How to get the ‘Orange and Teal’ look in Adobe Lightroom

Editing images these days is not as simple as you may think. Sure, you can apply any filter you want in Instagram, but to really produce an image that will capture the attention of your audience you should really take some time to think about your color grading.

One popular method for color grading is by split toning complementary colors, this creates color contrast and visual interest that attracts your viewer’s attention. One popular color grade is known as the Orange and Teal look, and as you might have guessed, it features orange and teal.

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Getting a color grade like Orange and Teal to work can seem much more complicated that it really is. YouTuber Denny’s Tips has produced this great video on how to achieve this look in Adobe Lightroom or Camera RAW very easily. In just a few minutes Denny walks you through the simple process of getting this color-graded look, but as you will see when you try it yourself, some tweaking will be required depending on the image you are attempting to do this with.

It all starts by jumping into the Camera Calibration section in Lightroom. You simply pull your blue hue slider all the way back to -100, then you can go to the red hue slider and bump it up to around 50. This is the basis for the majority of the look, the rest of this color grade, according to Denny, is tweaking your tone curve to fit your artistic vision for the shot.

What’s more, once you get this down you aren’t stuck going for orange and teal, you can totally try out some other color combinations like pink and cyan, or any other combination you can think of. So this technique gets more powerful the more you play around with it. Have fun!

Anthony Thurston
Anthony is an internationally published photographer based in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Specializing primarily in…
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