How can you get turquoise water and warm sand tones like this beach photo?
Asked 3/20/2018
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I’m trying to understand the color treatment in a beach image where the sea looks strongly turquoise/blue while the sand and overall scene stay very warm. The whites don’t look heavily tinted, but the shadows and low tones feel stylized. Is this mainly lighting from golden hour, white balance, or post-processing? What edits would typically create this look?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
2 Answers
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It looks as if the red-cyan contrast has been increased to the extent that the subtler coloration of everything in the image has been pushed towards one of those poles. In particular, the shadows, which would normally be a duller sky-blue color, are distinctly cyan, while the sand and anything else in the image that had any red value at all is now very red. The image seems to be more or less white-balanced for the sunlight (no strong cast to the white sunlit areas).
Originally by user37649. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user37649
8y ago
0
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This look is most likely a mix of golden-hour light plus selective color editing in post.
Based on the answers, the image appears roughly white-balanced for the sunlight, so bright sunlit whites stay fairly neutral. The warm feel likely comes from shooting near golden hour, which naturally adds warm light to sand and highlights.
The stronger stylized look probably comes from post-processing:
- increase contrast
- boost saturation/vibrance
- push blues toward cyan/turquoise
- increase cyan/blue saturation, and possibly luminance
- warm up oranges/yellows/reds so the sand looks richer and redder than normal
In Lightroom terms, this could be done mostly with the HSL/Color panel by adjusting hue, saturation, and luminance for blues/cyans and oranges/yellows/reds. A split-tone/color-grading approach is also possible: cooler shadows and warmer highlights, though the effect here seems driven more by selective color tweaks than heavy overall toning.
So the short answer: neutral-ish white balance for sunlit areas, warm golden-hour light, then HSL color pushes and extra contrast/saturation in editing.
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