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Writer's picture@chiarik22

How to get the perfect autumn look in your photos - Lightroom Tutorial / Part 1

Updated: Nov 27, 2020

Autumn is a great time of year because of its beautiful colors of the shedding of leaves from the trees. This natural process has inspired so many poets, writers, painters for centuries and it keeps fashinating photographers and creators all around the world.

With this tutorial you will learn how to enhance those autumn vibes in your photos while editing with Lightroom. By following the instructions below you will get a basic autumn preset that helps you to give a better look to your images.

I’ve chosen this classic autumn mood photo because it includes the greens, oranges, and yellows that are common in this particular season. Here is a look at the before and after photos.


Step 1: Basic Adjustments

Open any image you took in Adobe Lightroom and apply the following settings in basic panel:

Temperature 5000, and Tint +13.

Adjust also highlights -42, shadows +77, whites -33, blacks -22.

As we need to achieve warmer tones give more Saturation +8 and decrease Vibration -22.

Then, consider that Exposure can vary with each image, so decide which is the value that performs better for you. At this step you don't need to change the default Contrast settings.


Step 2: Adjust the Tone Curve

By adjusting the Tone Curve, you can make your images brighter or darker, and affect the contrast levels. First, enter Chanel View by clicking the curved line in the bottom right-hand corner as shown in the first screenshot here below.

This is the view where you can add anchor-point to your curve. Let's start and click in the curve at 25% crossing and set an anchor point:


Step 3: Add a Fade Effect

Now, click the bottom left corner of the Tone Curve and grab the anchor-point in that corner. Start adjusting to your liking. Consider that if you move the anchor-point upwards, it will cause the faded photo effect: black areas in your photo will be dark grey instead of black.

Next, adjust your Tone Curve by adding another anchor-point exactly in the center of the line (50% crossing). As we don't need to achieve a very heavy fade effect it's ok adjusting the Tone Curve to control better the contrast by adding more anchor-points like this:


Step 4: Fun with Autumn Colors

Here you are for the fun part!! Ready to start?

First, I’ll apply the following settings with Lightroom’s color calibration at the bottom of the develop module:

  • RED PRIMARY: hue +12, saturation +14

  • GREEN PRIMARY: hue -13, saturation +29

  • BLUE PRIMARY: hue -37, saturation -13

  • TINT SHADOWS: +17.

This is the autumn photo effect we wanted to achieve, but we need one more step to complete the process!


Step 5: the Final Touch

The last adjustment I’ll make to this image is to give a small boost to the autumn colors in the HSL settings:

  • HUE: red +10, orange +10, yellow -19, green -47

  • SATURATION: red -11, orange -10, yellow -12, green saturation -53

  • LUMINANCE: red -2, orange -18, yellow -23, green -36.

Use now the Split Toning panel to add colors to your shadows and highlights and increase brown tones in the shadows to get an even more autumn look on your photo.


Step 6: Create a Preset

After you made the edits, you may want to save your work as a preset so that you can quickly apply it to other photos!

Click on the (+) in the Preset panel on the left of the screen, and then give your preset a name.

Here’s the tutorial video for more instructions about How to install Lightroom Presets


 

NOTE:

These are optional recommendations. This tutorial intends to give you some new tips you can use in Lightroom to make your photos look more like fall and give them that autumn look.

Of course, feel free to ignore them or some if they’re not your style or they don't fit your photo.


WHAT MATTERS: experimenting and having fun while editing and discovering new things.


– Chiarik22 ♡







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