What is the difference to the old options like WB, Tone Curve, HSL/Color and Split Toning controls? What can Colour Grading tools do better?
Until the most recent versions of Lightroom Classic, the tools were much more about color correction than color grading. It is important to understand that those are two different stages, and neither can replace the other.
Color correction means to take the original image and remove any unwanted imbalances in color or tone. The resulting properly balanced image is said to be color corrected. But at this point it’s been corrected technically or academically, but not aesthetically or emotionally.
Color grading means to express a mood, emotional state, or historical period by manipulating color. Here, you might intentionally introduce different color balances (e.g. a complementary color palette) or imbalances to convey the emotional impact you want. You might want to dial in different color balances for highlights, midtones, and shadows, something the Basic panel Temp and Tint sliders cannot do.
It’s easy to understand how this could get confusing. Although you can’t replace color correction with color grading or vice versa, you can try to use either set of tools for the other purpose. Most photographers cross over from color correction to color grading without realizing it. For example, white balance is intended as a color correction tool, but after achieving a neutral white balance, in the same step many of us might also nudge it a little warmer because that’s how we
felt it looked like, even if that wasn’t how it actually looked if you were there.
Similarly, it is possible to use the new Color Grading tools for color correction, but they can’t do it all because that’s not what they’re designed for. The Color Grading tools can’t reproduce all of the results you get from adjusting Highlights, Shadows, RGB curves, HSL, etc. And the color correction tools (Basic, Tone Curve, HSL) can’t reproduce all of the results you get from the Color Grading tools.
Because the new Color Grading tools do what they say, no more and no less, they're usually best used last, after all color corrections are complete. Color grading — or applying a grading (not correction) LUT/profile — to an image that is not color corrected is usually disappointing. LUTs work best and most consistently on images that are consistently corrected and balanced before grading.
Now, about getting that 80s look. If you can’t find ready-made presets that get that look, you’ll want to define what makes them look that way, in terms of tone and color, and that might take some research. What was the look of common film stocks of the era (since most movies could not afford to alter that very much)? Which colors did the Kodak and Fuji motion picture films of that era lean toward or away from? Were there colors that always saturated completely? What did the contrast curve look like from shadows to highlights, was it shallow or steep? Did the ends of the tonal range clip, or have a rolloff? Then, on top of that, did the cinema colorists of the 1980s have a particular style that they were after, that was different than what colorists did in other decades?
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