Colour grading

Colour Harmony in Retouching: How I Pick a Palette With the Colour Wheel

By Pulak Mondal7 min readBeauty · Fashion · Editorial

A good colour grade is not a filter. It is a decision. Before I touch a curve, I pick two or three colours that belong together, and every adjustment after that pushes the image towards them. Here is how I use the colour wheel to make that decision, with real before and afters from my work.

The six harmonies, in one minute

• Primary (triadic): three colours evenly spaced on the wheel. Bold and playful, best for creative or fashion work.
• Analogous: neighbours on the wheel, like orange, amber and yellow. Calm and natural. Great for skin and golden-hour light.
• Secondary: orange, green and violet. Rich and a little unusual, good for editorial looks.
• Complementary: two opposite colours, like teal and red or blue and orange. The strongest contrast, and the reason so many film posters look the way they do.
• Square (tetradic): four colours spaced evenly. Very lively, so one colour has to lead and the rest support.
• Split complementary: one colour plus the two neighbours of its opposite. All the contrast of complementary, but softer and easier to balance.

1. Complementary: teal against red lips

The original was shot on a flat black background with plum-coloured lips. Nothing was wrong, but nothing pulled the eye either. I moved the lips from plum to a true red and built a deep teal into the background. Teal sits opposite red on the wheel, so the lips now jump forward without any extra saturation on the skin.

Notice what did not change: the freckles, the moles and the small scar on the forehead are all still there. A colour grade should change the mood, not the person.

2. Blue and orange: warm skin, cool shadows

Blue and orange is the most useful pair in portrait retouching, because almost every skin tone sits in the orange part of the wheel. Here I pushed the shadows and background towards a deep navy and kept the skin in warm bronze. The highlight on the cheekbone stays clean and golden, and the face feels lit from within.

3. Square: a creative makeup look

Creative makeup already brings a lot of colour: red, green, blue and glitter. The grey studio background was fighting it. I replaced it with a textured teal that sits between the green and blue in the makeup, brightened the red at the hairline and cleaned the skin around the paint. With a square harmony, one colour has to lead, so I let teal take the background and kept red as the accent.

4. Split complementary: from magenta to smoke green

The original was lit with strong magenta gels. It was striking, but the skin had gone purple. I regraded the smoke and background into a muted green-teal and kept a soft mauve in the jacket and lips. Mauve with green and teal is a split complementary set, so it still has contrast, but it feels calm and cinematic instead of loud.

5. Two colours only: the iridescent veil

Sometimes the best harmony is the smallest one. The iridescent fabric throws off every colour in the rainbow, so I held the whole image to just two: a dark indigo and a soft peach for the skin. The fabric keeps its shimmer, but nothing distracts from the face.

6. It works on more than people

This kitten was photographed on a cluttered floor next to a black bag. I removed the clutter, built a soft navy wall behind him and let a warm light fall from the right. Orange fur against navy is the same blue-orange pair as the beauty profile, with a deep rust used as a third, quieter colour.

How I apply a harmony in Photoshop

1. Finish the clean-up first. Skin, stray hairs and distractions are fixed before any colour work, so the grade does not have to be redone.
2. Pick the anchor colour. Usually the skin tone, or the product colour for e-commerce.
3. Choose the harmony. I find the anchor on the wheel and decide which pattern suits the mood of the shoot.
4. Move the background and shadows, not the skin. Curves, Colour Balance and Selective Colour, masked away from the face, do most of the work.
5. Protect the skin. I check skin tones with the Info panel so they stay natural and consistent across the whole set.
6. Sample the palette. I pick three to five colours from the finished image. If they do not look like a set, the grade is not finished.
7. Final quality check. Every image is checked at 100% on a calibrated screen before delivery.