Chapter 27 — Exercises

Color is learned at the develop screen with a real file in front of you, so most of these ask you to process, grade, and compare — and a few ask you to look hard at described frames. Use any editor that has white-balance, HSL, and shadow/highlight color controls; every major phone editor now qualifies. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep your before/after pairs — the two-grade pair feeds your Portfolio.

The golden rule of this chapter, applied to every exercise: correct before you grade, and judge with fresh eyes.

Part A — Accurate color first (Settings Drill & Fix the Photo)

Exercise 27.1 ⭐ — Find the neutral. Open five of your own images shot in different light (window, shade, indoor bulb, overcast, flash). For each, name what in the frame you would click the white-balance eyedropper on to neutralize the cast — and what you would not click. Write the target and one sentence on why it's neutral. Then rank your five images by how hard the neutral was to find: a white wall is easy, a forest scene with no neutral at all is hard. The images with no obvious neutral are the ones where a grey card on the shoot would have saved you — note which those were.

Exercise 27.2 ⭐⭐ — Kill the cast. Take one image with an obvious color cast (an indoor shot under household bulbs is perfect — it'll be orange). Correct it three ways: (a) eyedropper on a neutral, (b) Temp/Tint sliders by eye only, (c) the camera's "as-shot" left untouched. Lay all three side by side. Which is most believable, and how far apart are the (a) and (b) Temperature values in kelvin? Note what your eye missed — most people under-correct by eye, leaving the image warmer than neutral, because their vision has already adapted to the warmth. Write down the gap in numbers; it's a measure of how much your eye lies.

Exercise 27.3 ⭐⭐ — The grey-card habit. On your next shoot, photograph a grey card (or a folded white coffee filter / the back of a white card) held in your subject's light as your first frame. Back at the desk, set white balance off it and sync that setting to every other frame from that light. Compare a synced frame to the same frame auto-balanced. Report the difference and whether the sync held across the set. Then break it on purpose: find a frame in the set that was shot in different light (you stepped into shade, a lamp came on) and confirm the synced WB looks wrong on it — proving the §27.4 rule that white balance is per-light, not one-size-fits-all.

Exercise 27.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Diagnose the over-correction. Find or make an image of a sunset (or any warm-light scene) that someone has "corrected" to technically neutral, so the gold is gone. Diagnose exactly what's wrong (a correct cast was removed) and prescribe the fix: which casts to neutralize and which warmth to keep. Then do it. You are practicing the §27.1 rule: neutralize casts that lie, keep the light's intentional character. Write the rule in your own words at the end — you'll apply it on every mixed-light scene for the rest of your shooting life.

Part B — HSL control (Shoot This & Settings Drill)

Exercise 27.5 ⭐ — One band at a time. Open any colorful image. Pick one color band (say, blue). Move only its Hue, return it; only its Saturation, return it; only its Luminance, return it. Watch what each does in isolation. Write one sentence each describing the visible effect. The goal is to never again confuse the three controls. Then do the hardest of the three to feel — Luminance — on three different bands (blue, green, orange) and watch how each changes the mood of the frame without changing any color: dropping blue luminance makes a sky brooding, lifting orange luminance makes skin and warm light glow. Luminance is the control most beginners never touch and pros use constantly.

Exercise 27.6 ⭐⭐ — Make the sky dramatic, honestly. Find a landscape with a bright, washed-out blue sky. Using only HSL on the blue band, make the sky deep and dramatic: saturation up a little, luminance down a lot. Stop the instant the gradient starts to band. Compare to the same effect attempted with global contrast + saturation. Which keeps the clouds and the rest of the frame intact? You should find the HSL approach darkens only the blue sky while leaving the clouds, the foreground, and any skin untouched — surgical where the global approach is a hammer. Note the exact point where the sky began to band; that's your ceiling for this image's blue channel.

Exercise 27.7 ⭐⭐ — Three targeted fixes (the §27.2 field shoot). Shoot one landscape at the park or trail with at least three distinct colors. Develop neutral, then make exactly three HSL improvements (deepen one color, calm/warm another, lift a warm element) and no global moves. Keep the finished file and list the three exact band-and-property moves you made.

Exercise 27.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — Silence the distraction. Find an image with one off-color element fighting the subject (a green exit sign, a stray red object, a blue recycling bin behind a portrait). Using HSL on that element's band — drop its saturation, shift its hue, or lower its luminance — make it recede without touching the subject's colors. Note what you changed and how much. The catch you'll discover: sometimes the distracting color shares a band with something you want to keep (the green sign and the green foliage both live in "green"). When that happens, write down how you'd solve it — a local/masked adjustment rather than a global HSL move — and you've just discovered why the next chapters lean on local tools. Color control is a hierarchy: global first, local when global isn't precise enough.

Part C — Color grading (Shoot This & Recreate It)

Exercise 27.9 ⭐ — Name the feeling. Take three images you like and, before touching a slider, write the one-word feeling each should evoke ("cold," "nostalgic," "clinical," "dreamy," "warm"). For each word, write which way you'd push the shadows and which way the highlights. You're practicing the most important grading habit: decide the direction before you grade. Then notice how much easier the actual grading is once the word is chosen — a named target turns a wall of sliders into two or three obvious moves. Photographers who skip this step flail; photographers who do it work fast.

Exercise 27.10 ⭐⭐ — The shadow/highlight split. Pick one corrected image. Drag the shadow grading wheel toward teal and the highlight wheel toward amber (the classic complementary split). Then pull the whole grade back to about a third of its first strength. Compare to the ungraded version. Describe what the split added — and check: did any skin or neutral go off? Now reverse it: warm shadows, cool highlights. The image will feel completely different (often older, more nostalgic, sometimes sickly). Write which direction suited this image and why. The split is a dial with two ends, and the scene decides which end.

Exercise 27.11 ⭐⭐ — Recreate "Cold morning, warm window." Recreate the spirit of Figure 27.5: a window-lit subject at the kitchen window, corrected to neutral, then graded with cool (teal) shadows for the room and warm (amber) highlights for the window light, midtones left honest. The challenge is restraint — the mood should feel present, not shout. Keep your result, and write the single sentence of mood you were trying to build ("the first cold minute before coffee"). If a viewer can guess your sentence from the image alone, the grade worked.

Exercise 27.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Three moods, one file. Take a single neutral landscape and produce three distinct grades from copies: "warm nostalgia," "cold and clinical," and "dreamy pastel." Same file, three feelings, each built with a shadow/highlight split and HSL. Lay them out and write what color decisions create each mood. This proves grading is a language, not a preset. Bonus: show the three (unlabeled) to someone else and ask them to match each to its feeling-word. If they can, your color is communicating; if they can't, your grades aren't distinct enough yet — push them further apart and try again.

Part D — Read the Frame

Exercise 27.13 ⭐⭐ — Diagnose the grade. Read this Described Photograph and name (a) what was corrected well, (b) what grading move was overdone, and (c) the one fix:

FIGURE EX27.1 — "Portrait, over-cooked"        [constructed teaching example]
  THE FRAME    A young man, head-and-shoulders, against a softly blurred green park background.
  THE LIGHT    Soft, frontal, even — open shade.
  THE COLOR    The shadows are dragged hard toward teal; global saturation is pushed high. His skin reads
               orange-going-pumpkin with a faint greenish cast in the cheek shadows; the green background is
               radioactive; there's no inner detail left in his red shirt — it's a flat red shape.
  THE EFFECT   Eye-catching at a glance, but it screams "filter." The face looks unwell.

Exercise 27.14 ⭐⭐ — Accurate or evocative? For each of these jobs, say whether the accurate or evocative grade is the right keeper and why, in one sentence: (a) a catalog photo of a blue sweater for an online store; (b) a moody travel shot of a foggy harbor for your portfolio; (c) a press photo of a city council meeting; (d) an editorial portrait for a magazine's "comfort food" feature; (e) a real-estate listing of a kitchen. Then add a sixth case of your own where the answer is genuinely ambiguous — where reasonable photographers could disagree — and argue both sides. Learning where the line isn't obvious is how you develop real judgment rather than a rulebook.

Exercise 27.15 ⭐⭐⭐ — Write the grade as a recipe. Read Figure 27.10 (Version B, the evocative harbor) in the chapter. Without looking at the listed moves, write the grading recipe you'd give another photographer to reproduce that feeling from the accurate base: the feeling-word, the shadow and highlight directions, the HSL shifts, and the final strength. Then check yourself against the chapter.

Part E — Skin and saturation (Fix the Photo & Five Conditions)

Exercise 27.16 ⭐ — Saturation vs. vibrance. Take one portrait. Apply +40 saturation on one copy and +40 vibrance on another. Compare the skin and the most-vivid color in each. Write which protected the skin and which blew out the vivid color first. You'll default to vibrance forever after. Then zoom to 100% on the most saturated color in the +40-saturation version and look for banding or loss of texture inside it — the visual signature of a clipped color channel. Once you've seen it, you'll recognize over-saturation across the internet instantly.

Exercise 27.17 ⭐⭐ — Protect the skin under a grade. Take a portrait and apply a cool (teal) shadow grade strong enough that the skin starts to go off. Now use HSL on the orange/red bands to recover the skin (lift its luminance, restore a little warmth) while leaving the cool shadow grade on everything else. Report the moves. This is the single most useful retouching skill in this chapter — the difference between a grade that looks professional and one that makes your subject look ill. Do it twice: once on a lighter complexion and once on a darker one, and note how the darker skin needs its richness (saturation) protected as much as its warmth.

Exercise 27.18 ⭐⭐ — The five-grade complexion test. Find portraits of five different complexions (your own shots, ideally; otherwise study described examples fairly). Apply the same gentle warm grade to all five. Check each face: where does the grade flatter, and where does it make a skin tone look ashen, ruddy, or grey? Write what you'd adjust per-complexion. This builds the §27.5 / accessibility habit of checking the face specifically — and teaches the harder truth that one "look" never sits identically on every skin, so a grade applied across a group shot or a wedding party needs per-person attention to the faces, not a blanket push.

Exercise 27.19 ⭐⭐⭐ — Find the saturation cliff. Take one richly colored image and raise global saturation in steps (+10, +20, +30, +40, +50), exporting each. Identify the exact step where (a) a vivid color loses inner detail, (b) skin stops looking like skin, and (c) the image flattens because everything is equally loud. Mark your personal "cliff." You'll grade below it from now on. Repeat the whole exercise with vibrance instead and note how much further you can push before hitting the same three failures — usually a lot further, and with skin staying believable longest. Keep the two step-strips side by side as a permanent reminder of why vibrance is the default.

Part F — A consistent look (Recreate It)

Exercise 27.20 ⭐⭐ — Build a look, make it travel. Grade one "hero" image to a finished look you love. Save it as a preset. Apply it to four different images (different subjects and light), then adjust only white balance and exposure on each. Which images did the look flatter, and which fought it? Report what makes a look travel well. Write down, specifically, which parts of your look were grade (and traveled) and which were really corrections baked in by mistake (and broke on the new images) — this is how you learn to build looks that contain only what should travel.

Exercise 27.21 ⭐⭐ — The restraint test. Take your look from 27.20 and make a quieter version at half the strength. Apply both versions across the same four images. Which version fits more of the four? Confirm or refute the §27.4 claim that restrained looks travel further. Then imagine the loud version applied to a 300-image wedding gallery and the quiet version to the same gallery: which would you rather have to deliver, and which would you rather look at as the couple in five years? Restraint is a long-game decision.

Exercise 27.22 ⭐⭐⭐ — The consistent set. Choose six images you shot in different sessions. Develop and grade them into one coherent set — same look, each corrected locally — so a stranger would believe they were one body of work. Lay them out. Where does the consistency hold and where does one image still stick out? This is the §27.4 skill that becomes your style later (Ch.39) and your portfolio's color-coherence (Ch.40).

Part G — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 27.23 ⭐⭐ — Light begets grade. Pull two images: one shot at golden hour (Ch.5) and one shot under flat overcast. For each, decide whether grading should amplify the light's existing character or counter it, and grade accordingly. Write how the original light shaped your grading choice. (Connects Ch.5's seeing to this chapter's editing.) The deeper lesson: a grade works with what the light gave you, not against it. Amplifying golden hour's warmth is easy and natural; forcing warmth onto a cold overcast frame usually looks fake. Note which of your two images fought you, and consider that the capture light set the ceiling on what the grade could honestly do — exactly the point the whole book keeps making about light.

Exercise 27.24 ⭐⭐ — Harmony into the highlights. Take a color-driven image you made for Chapter 7 (one built on a named harmony). Grade it to strengthen its harmony — push the existing colors further apart or closer together in the wheel. Did the grade serve the composition or fight it? (Connects Ch.7's color harmony to grading.) Try the opposite too: deliberately break the harmony with a clashing grade and see how quickly a coherent color image turns chaotic. This proves that grading isn't separate from composition — it's composition continued at the develop screen, strengthening or wrecking the color relationships you built in the field.

Exercise 27.25 ⭐⭐⭐ — From RAW to two grades. Take a single RAW keeper you re-processed in Chapter 26. From that developed base, build the full two-grade pair: accurate and evocative. This is the Portfolio Checkpoint done end to end, and it stitches the whole Part VI develop chain — RAW (Ch.26) → color (Ch.27) — into one workflow.

Exercise 27.26 ⭐⭐ — Histogram check on a grade. After building an evocative grade, open the histogram (Ch.3/Ch.26) and switch it to show the individual red, green, and blue channels if your editor allows. Did your grade clip a channel against a wall (a saturated red or blue jammed to the edge)? If so, back it off until the channel has detail again. Report what you found. Grading can clip color channels just as exposure clips highlights — and a clipped color channel is the hidden cause of much "over-cooked" look. Learning to spot it on the histogram, not just by eye, makes you the person who catches the problem before export.

Exercise 27.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — Black-and-white preview. Take one image you graded for color and also convert it to black-and-white (rough desaturate is fine for now). Which version is stronger, and why? Note what the color was doing that tone can or cannot replace. You're setting up Chapter 28, where color becomes your control over tone. Pay attention to a surprise: some images that depended entirely on a color relationship (red against green) collapse into mud in black-and- white because those two colors can convert to nearly identical greys — which is exactly the problem Chapter 28 teaches you to solve with channel control. File this observation; it's the bridge to the next chapter.

Part H — Eye Training & the Light Log (no camera)

Exercise 27.28 ⭐ — Add a color line to the Light Log. Tonight's Light Log entry: name the color of the light in one everyday scene and what cast it would add to a photo (the orange of your desk lamp, the green of an old fluorescent tube, the cool blue of dusk through a window). You're training the eye that makes correction fast. Keep adding a color line to your Light Log for a week, and by the end you'll have catalogued the casts of every light you live under — so that when you open a file shot in any of them, you'll already know which way to correct before you touch a slider.

Exercise 27.29 ⭐⭐ — Grade the movies. Watch ten minutes of any film or show with the sound off and only watch the color grade. Note three scenes: what's in the shadows, what's in the highlights, and what feeling the split creates. Films are a free masterclass in shadow/highlight grading. Write what you saw. Then pick one of those three looks and try to reproduce its feeling on one of your own photographs — not to copy the film, but to prove you can translate a grade you observed into a grade you can build. Seeing and doing are different muscles; this exercise links them.

Exercise 27.30 ⭐⭐⭐ — Spot the grade in the wild. Over a day, find three photographs (ads, magazine covers, social feeds) that are clearly graded, not just corrected. For each, reverse-engineer the look: shadow hue, highlight hue, overall saturation strategy, and how skin was protected (or not). Reading grades backward is how you'll build your own. Pay special attention to the failures — the over-orange influencer, the radioactive food shot, the portrait with a green-tinged face — and write the one correction each needed. Diagnosing other people's color mistakes is the fastest way to stop making them yourself.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 27.31 ⭐⭐⭐ — One image, the full chapter. Take a single strong image with mood potential and a person in it. Run the entire chapter on it, in order, in writing as you go: (1) correct to neutral off a real neutral; (2) HSL fixes; (3) name the feeling; (4) shadow and highlight grade; (5) protect the skin with HSL; (6) pull the grade back; (7) save it as a reusable look; (8) make the accurate counterpart; (9) sleep on the pair; (10) choose the keeper and justify it by the image's purpose. Submit both versions and your ten-step log. This single exercise is the chapter — if you do only one starred exercise here, do this one.

Exercise 27.32 ⭐⭐ — Grade an old keeper, then ask if you improved it. Pull one image you finished months ago and were proud of. Re-grade it with the chapter's method. Now the hard question: is the new version actually better, or just different — or did you over-cook a photo that was already right? Sometimes the answer is that your old self nailed it and your new tools tempted you to ruin it. Keep whichever is genuinely stronger and write one honest sentence about what you learned. Restraint includes the restraint to leave a good image alone.

Exercise 27.33 ⭐⭐⭐ — The "no grade" defense. Find one image in your library that you believe should stay completely accurate — no grade at all. Write the case for it: what is it for, and why would any mood treatment weaken it? Then, to test yourself, grade it anyway and confirm (or revise) your conclusion. The goal is to prove you can choose not to grade as deliberately as you choose to grade. A photographer who can only add a look is as limited as one who never does.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Process each yourself before reading them — in color work, the comparison you make with your own eyes is the lesson.