As I started growing my own personal brand on Instagram and on my blog, I wanted to use a better editing software for my pictures. That is when I discovered Lightroom CC and I am obsessed with this app because it really lets you customize your pictures depending on what theme you are going for. For my own instagram, I try to go focus on the oranges and greens in each picture. I definitely like the way warm tones look and that’s what I always keep in mind when I am creating presets. I have used other people’s presets, but I honestly have more fun creating my own and just playing around with each color.
If you want to know more about how I create my own presets, just keep reading!
So because I am going for warm tones, I try to bring out the hue, saturation and luminance of all the oranges and greens in a picture. You can either use the desktop version of Lightroom or the App. Basically what you want to do is make sure you are taking pictures in natural lighting because sometimes one preset that you make won’t look on pictures taken indoors. Let’s use this picture as an example…
This was taken in natural lighting and you can see that there is a lot of orange in the picture. I like to make my pictures clean, white, while focusing on the warm tones.
Simple Steps for using Lightroom:
- Adjust the Light – Increase the highlights so that all the lighter spots in the photo will appear more bright. You also want to make sure that you adjust the whites to your desire; for this picture in particular, I had turned down the whites because I didn’t want it looking too overexposed with the highlights already being so high. Next, you want to adjust the blacks so that the dark parts of the photo will appear more dark and give a bit of pop and contrast.
- Color – This part can be difficult because it definitely took me awhile to learn. Depending on what your theme is, you can adjust each color’s hue, saturation and luminance. Since I am going for a clean, crisp orange theme, I like to adjust the orange color so it is more saturated than the other colors and turn down the saturation for yellow so everything will seem more white and clean. Sometimes if the photo doesn’t contain all colors it can be hard to know how to adjust those specific colors so that the preset will look good on other pictures. You kinda have to just play around with it and figure out as you go.
- Effect – To make it seem like you took the picture on a DSLR camera, you want to adjust the clarity of the picture and dehaze it a little bit. I like to have my pictures have a little bit of a vignette but it’s not everyone’s taste.
- Detail – Make sure the sharpness is increased a little, you don’t want to overdo this because it can look unnatural.
That’s it! You made it! Let me know how it goes
CYNTHIA WU 