Light, White Balance and Colour Grading adjustments
Photo-style adjustments in Paint by Zaweba: Light sliders, White Balance with a grey-point eyedropper, and Colour Grading wheels, plus ASC CDL.
Anyone who has edited photos in a RAW developer will know a familiar set of sliders: exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, temperature and tint, and colour wheels for grading. Paint by Zaweba brings those into the layered editor as adjustments, so you can use the same way of thinking on any picture, not just camera RAW files.
Light
Light has six sliders: exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks.
Exposure sets overall brightness. Contrast spreads or narrows the tones. Highlights and shadows work on the bright and dark areas without touching the very ends. Whites and blacks set the extremes, deciding how close the brightest and darkest tones go to pure white and pure black.
A good order is to set exposure first so the picture's overall brightness is right, then contrast, then pull highlights down and lift shadows to recover detail, and finally set whites and blacks for clean ends.
White Balance
White Balance has temperature and tint, plus a grey-point eyedropper. Temperature runs from cool blue to warm yellow; tint from green to magenta.
The eyedropper is the fast route. Click something in the picture that should be neutral, like a white shirt, grey pavement or a sheet of paper, and the temperature and tint are set to make it neutral. Then adjust by eye if you want a warmer or cooler mood.
Colour Grading
Colour Grading has colour wheels for shadows, midtones, highlights and global, with blending and balance.
Each wheel tints its part of the tonal range. The classic grade is a cool tint in the shadows and a warm one in the highlights, which gives depth and a filmic quality. Blending controls how much the ranges overlap, and balance shifts the dividing line between shadows and highlights.
Global tints everything, which is useful for a gentle overall colour.
More specialist adjustments
Slope/Offset/Power follows the ASC CDL, a standard used in film and television colour work. If you work with video colourists or need to match a grade described in those terms, this is the adjustment to use.
Hue/Chroma works in OKLCh, a modern colour space designed so that equal changes look equally large to the eye. It's good for shifting hues or changing colourfulness without unexpected changes in brightness.
Normals is a specialist adjustment for normal maps, the images used in 3D work to fake surface detail.
How they fit together
A complete photo edit could go: White Balance to neutralise, Light to set tones, Colour Grading to set mood. Each on its own adjustment layer means you can come back to any stage, mask any of them, and lower the strength of any.
These adjustments also suit pictures that didn't start as RAW files. A JPEG from a phone, a scan or a screenshot can all take the same treatment.
Grades that go too far
Pushing shadows and highlights too far is the common one. The picture loses contrast and looks flat and grey. Recover what you need and stop.
Using the eyedropper on something that isn't really neutral, like warm skin or a cream wall, puts a cast in instead of removing it.
Overdoing the grading wheels is easy because the effect builds up. Small moves on the wheels are usually enough.
With these adjustments, Paint by Zaweba offers a photographer's toolkit inside a layered editor, and each step stays editable.
