Minimalist street "black gold/silhouette color style" post-production color grading: darkened shadow saturation and warm yellow highlight split toning (Split Toning)

1. The core color physical structure of the black gold style

A high-end black gold street work must strictly adhere to the following color and brightness distribution specifications:

1. Shadows/Darks:

• Close to pure black but without irreversible Toe Clipping;
• Absolute Chroma Stripping: Dark parts must appear pure neutral cool gray or deep black brown, It is strictly forbidden to leave messy low-saturated red and green noise.

2. Midtones & Highlights:

• Preserve the sense of light beam penetration (such as sunset, street light projection, window lattice golden light);
• The hue is strictly limited to the narrow color spectrum range of Orange (Hue 30° to 45°) and Warm Gold (Gold), eliminating pale dead white highlights.

3. Environment Noise Dimensionality Reduction (Color Simplification):

• Reduce the saturation of the green, cyan, purple and magenta channels by 80% to 100%, leaving only orange, yellow and a little red as emotional carriers.

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2. Adobe Lightroom Classic/Photoshop industrial-grade color grading process

2.1 Step 1: Basic exposure and Tone Curve shaping

1. Contrast reconstruction:

• Lower the black level (Blacks: -25 to -40) to quickly suppress the street shadows and pedestrian outlines into solid silhouettes.
• Brighten highlights (Highlights: +15 to +25) to increase the impact of sunset light spots.
• Reduce the shadows (Shadows: -15) to create a tough light and dark section on the building facade.

2. S-shaped fine-tuning point curve (RGB Curve):

• At the bottom of the curve (input range 0-20), slightly pull the starting anchor point upward (increase the output to 5-8) to form a Matte Finish in the dark areas, injecting a layer of warm film air into the deep black, while stretching the middle and lower parts downward to consolidate the contrast.

2.2 Step 2: HSL/Color Channel “Violent Purification”

Whether the street scene is clean or not, 90% depends on the precise surgical operation of this step:

• Hue:
• Slightly adjust red towards orange (Red: +15);
• Lean the yellow sharply toward orange (Yellow: -35 to -50), so that the yellow streetlights and sunlight converge into a rich amber gold.
• Saturation:
• Orange: Keep at +10 to +20 (this is the core energy of human face skin color and golden light);
• Yellow: slight increase +5;
• Key Subtraction: Drag the saturation of Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, and Magenta all towards -80% to -100%.
• Luminance:
• Brighten orange (+20) and darken blue (-40), making the sky and building shadows further fade.

2.3 Step 3: Color Grading (Color Grading/Separation Tone) Enlightenment

In Lightroom’s Color Grading color wheel panel:

• Highlights:
• Hue rotated to 42° ~ 48° (pure amber gold);
• Push Saturation to 35 ~ 50;
• Shadows:
• Plan A (classic black gold): The hue is set to 215° (slightly refrigerated cyan), and the saturation is controlled at a very weak 8 ~ 12. The contrast between cold and warm complementary colors can make the high-gloss gold look more vibrant and eye-catching;
• Option B (pure dark gold): Set the hue to 35° (dark brown dark gold) and the saturation to 15 to create a retro monochromatic texture similar to old movies.
• Balance Slider: Slide it to the right to +30 to +50 to ensure that the warm gold penetrates large areas of the mid-highlights, while the shadows remain pure and uncontaminated.

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3. Avoid pitfalls and aesthetic bottom line

[!CAUTION]

• "Dirty Black" and Fake HDR Texture:
  In order to show details, many novices blindly pull the shadows to +100, and then add contrast roughly, causing a layer of dirty gray noise like plaster to appear on the dark asphalt road. The soul of the black gold style lies in "dare to give up" - Anbu that has no information value should be allowed to sink decently into pure black. Only resolute black can bring out the nobility and sanctity of gold.
• Sallow complexion of human face and corpse color of hair:
  If the image contains a clear close-up of a human face, overbiasing the yellow and draining the red will cause the model's face to look blue and yellow. Solution: Create a "Subject/Character Mask" in the local mask to protect the facial selection separately and restore the healthy reddish color.

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