Last month I was going through a batch of street portraits I’d shot in Nashville and I couldn’t figure out why they felt flat. The exposure was fine. The composition was solid. But something in the colour was just… nowhere. Not filmic, not clean, not anything. I’d been defaulting to the same lukewarm edit I’d been using for six months, and it had stopped serving the images without me noticing.

That’s exactly when I came across this Sean Tucker video, and it reframed the problem in a way that actually stuck.

The Three Stages Sean Identifies (and Why They’re So Honest)

Tucker opens by mapping out a creative arc that I think most photographers quietly live through but rarely name out loud. Stage one is shooting in black and white, or treating colour as an afterthought. Stage two is over-processing, where you discover all the sliders and use all of them at once. Stage three is under-processing, the overcorrection where you’ve been burned by garish edits and now you’re afraid to touch anything.

What he’s really describing is the difference between reactive editing and intentional editing. Most of us bounce between stages two and three for years. The goal he’s pointing toward is something more considered: knowing why you’re making each move, not just what the move is.

That framing alone is worth writing down. I’ve named presets after songs for years because it forces me to connect the mood of the music to the mood of the image. But even I was guilty of reaching for “Summerteeth” (warm, slightly faded) by reflex rather than by intention.

What “Intentional Colour” Actually Means in Practice

Tucker’s core argument is that colour should serve the story of the image, not your stylistic comfort zone or whatever trend is circulating on Instagram this week. He talks about moving away from asking “does this look cool?” and toward asking “does this colour choice communicate what I felt when I took the shot?”

That’s a harder question. It requires you to have an opinion about the image before you touch a slider. It means deciding whether the scene was warm or cool, energetic or still, saturated or muted, and then editing toward that quality rather than toward a generic preset aesthetic.

He uses the word “intentional” repeatedly, and it’s not filler. He means it technically: every adjustment should have a reason.

The Lightroom Workflow, Step by Step

The demo section (starting around the 6:22 mark) is where Tucker gets specific, and it’s the most transferable part of the video for anyone working in Lightroom.

He starts in the Basic panel, getting exposure and contrast to a neutral baseline before touching colour at all. This matters more than people think. If your whites are blown or your shadows are crushed, colour grading on top of that is just polishing a bad foundation.

From there he moves into the HSL panel, which is where his approach separates itself from a simple preset drag. Rather than shifting hues globally, he works colour by colour, asking what each hue is doing to the image and whether it should stay, shift, or be desaturated. He’s not boosting everything. He’s sculpting.

The tone curve gets used for contrast and for subtle colour influence, particularly in the shadows. Lifting the blue channel slightly in the shadows, for example, can add a cooler, more cinematic feel without touching the white balance at all. It’s a more surgical tool than the temperature slider and it gives you a lot more control over where the colour shift actually lives in the frame.

He also spends time in the Color Grading panel (formerly Split Toning), using it to push warmth into highlights and keep shadows neutral, or vice versa. The key is that he keeps the adjustments modest. Subtle colour grading tends to read as atmosphere. Heavy colour grading tends to read as a filter.

Where I’d Push Back (or Push Further)

Tucker’s workflow is built around a clean, controlled look that reads beautifully on his portraits and street work. For that kind of photography, restraint is exactly right.

But I’ve found that for certain high-contrast urban scenes, especially at golden hour, the HSL panel alone doesn’t give me enough control over the orange and red spectrum without it bleeding into skin tones. This is where I’ll bring in a luminosity mask approach or use Lightroom’s masking tools to separate the warm environmental tones from a subject’s face before making HSL adjustments. If you’re editing portraits where the background has strong sunset tones, it’s worth building that separation in rather than trying to finesse it out of a global colour panel.

That’s not a critique of Tucker’s method. It’s an extension of it. His principle, that every adjustment should be intentional, applies just as much to masking decisions as to slider positions.

The One Thing to Take Into Your Next Edit

Colour grading isn’t a finishing move you apply after the “real” editing is done. It’s a language you’re using to tell the viewer how to feel about what they’re looking at.

Watch the full video to see Tucker demonstrate these adjustments on actual images, because seeing the before-and-after in motion is genuinely clarifying in a way that screenshots can’t replicate.