Correction first, grading second
Grading is applying a deliberate look. It only works on a properly corrected base, so fix exposure, contrast and white balance first. Grading a photo with a colour cast just layers one cast over another.
Split toning with Colour Balance
The classic cinematic look is warm highlights and cool shadows. A Colour Balance adjustment layer has separate controls for Shadows, Midtones and Highlights — push shadows towards blue or teal, highlights towards yellow or orange. Keep Preserve Luminosity ticked so you shift colour without changing brightness.
Curves per channel
The same effect with more control: in the Blue channel, raise the shadow end of the line and lower the highlight end. That is split toning in one move, and because it is a curve you control exactly which tones are affected.
Selective Colour
Underrated, and the best tool for fixing one colour that is not working. It adjusts the CMYK makeup of individual colour ranges — so you can desaturate only the reds, or shift only the greens towards yellow, without touching anything else. Very useful for foliage that has gone acid-green and for skin tones that drift orange during a grade.
Colour Lookup
A Colour Lookup adjustment layer applies a LUT — a preset colour transform. The built-ins are mostly too strong at full strength; drop opacity to 20–40% and treat them as a starting point. You can also load .cube LUTs from elsewhere.
Keep it consistent and repeatable
Build the grade as a stack of adjustment layers, group it, name the group, and save it. Drag that group into another image and the whole look transfers. For a set of photos shot in one session this is the difference between a coherent series and eight images that each look slightly different.
Watch skin tones throughout. Almost any grade that looks great on a landscape does something unpleasant to faces, and masking the grade off the skin — or pulling it back with Selective Colour — is usually the last step.