I have a preset I made three years ago called “Rumble.” It’s named after a Link Wray track, which is exactly the kind of thing I do. It lives in a folder on my hard drive with about 200 other presets I’ve built over the years, and it gets applied to more portrait sessions than anything else I’ve made. The secret ingredient, the thing that makes it feel warm and slightly cinematic without looking like an Instagram filter from 2013, is split toning. Specifically: a subtle amber push in the shadows and a cooler, almost lavender shift in the highlights. Nobody asks me what I did. They just say the photos feel different. That’s the goal.

What Split Toning Is Actually Doing to Your Image

Split toning lets you assign different color hues to the shadows and highlights of an image independently. In Lightroom Classic, you’ll find it inside the Color Grading panel, which replaced the old Split Toning panel in the 2020 update. The interface now gives you three color wheels: Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. Each wheel lets you set a Hue (0-360 degrees, where 0 and 360 are both red, 180 is cyan) and a Luminance, which controls how bright or dark that color range sits.

The mechanics underneath are straightforward. Lightroom is mapping a color tint onto a specific luminosity range of your image. It’s not destructive in the RAW editing sense. You’re not baking anything in until you export. What makes it feel powerful rather than gimmicky is understanding that the effect is proportional. A shadow region at 20% luminosity gets more of that tint than a shadow at 45%. This is why split toning can feel invisible when it’s working well, the gradation is organic, not a flat color overlay.

The Settings That Actually Move the Needle

Most tutorials tell you to “experiment with warm shadows.” Here’s something more useful. Start with your shadows wheel and drag the hue to somewhere between 30 and 50 (that’s orange-to-amber territory). Pull the saturation to 15. That’s it, at first. Then look at your image. On a skin tone, you’ll feel a warmth in the darker parts of the face, under the jaw, in the hair shadows, without touching the overall white balance.

For highlights, try pulling toward the opposite end of the color wheel from your shadows. If your shadows are at 35, try highlights around 200-220 (that’s a soft blue-green). Set saturation to 8. Saturation in highlights almost always needs to be lower than in shadows because bright areas reflect more color and can look artificial fast.

The Blending slider, sitting at the bottom of the Color Grading panel, controls how much the three tonal zones overlap. At 50 (the default), you get a reasonable crossover. Drag it toward 0 and the zones become more separate and distinct. Drag it toward 100 and they bleed into each other. For portraits I usually sit around 40. For landscapes with strong sky-to-earth contrast, I’ll drop it to 25 and get more separation.

The Balance slider shifts whether the midtones lean toward the shadows or highlights definition. Pushing it to +20 pulls midtones closer to the highlight treatment. This matters for skin tones because faces often live in the midtone range, and you want to control which tint they absorb.

Why the Color Wheel Beats Sliders for This Work

The old Split Toning panel used individual Hue and Saturation sliders, and you could use it effectively, but you were essentially flying blind. The current Color Grading wheels let you see exactly where on the spectrum you’re placing your tint, and the visual relationship between all three wheels at once tells you immediately whether your choices are harmonious or chaotic.

A complementary split (warm shadows, cool highlights) is the most common and forgiving approach. An analogous split (both shadow and highlight tints from adjacent hues, say amber and gold) creates a monochromatic, cohesive warmth that works well for golden hour work. A triadic approach, where you’re using three hues equally spaced around the wheel, is advanced and usually only works if the image itself has strong, graphic shapes.

The Time I Went Too Far (and What I Learned From It)

A few years back I spent a full weekend building a preset pack. Fifty presets, organized by mood, all named after songs. I pushed the split toning on most of them harder than I should have. I thought bolder meant more distinctive. I released the pack for free, it got downloaded 50,000 times, and within a week I was getting emails from people saying the presets looked great as starting points but needed to be dialed back before they were usable on real client work.

That feedback changed how I build presets now. The split toning in anything I release sits at about 60% of what I actually want it to be. I leave room for the person applying it to push further based on their image. A preset that teaches someone how to move is more valuable than one that does all the moving for them.

When to Use Split Toning and When to Leave It Alone

Not every image needs it. High-key product photography, technical documentation shots, anything where color accuracy is a contractual requirement. Split toning is a creative layer, not a correction tool. It should enhance the story the light is already telling.

Where it earns its place: moody portraits, travel and street photography, film-emulation edits, any image where you’re chasing a specific emotional register rather than a neutral rendering. If you can describe how you want the image to feel before you open Lightroom, split toning is one of the fastest ways to get there.

The single most important thing I can tell you about split toning is this: the best version of it is the one the viewer never consciously notices. If someone looks at your photo and thinks “cool color grade,” you’ve gone too far. If they just feel something, you’ve got it right.