Hello! My name is Kellan Hendry and I am an 18 year old creative living in Cape Town, South Africa. I specialize in creative Photoshop edits that have a fantasy aspect but also an aspect of realism to them. I’m going to be showing you how I turn my bland Photoshop edits into a vibrant, moody image with some awesome tones in Lightroom. See some more of my creative edits on my Instagram, @kellansworld.
At the end of the edit walkthrough, you’ll find more information about my presets that are for sale. Hope this helps you in some way!
So this is a before/after of the image right after one of presets has been applied. For this photo, I applied my ‘STELLAR BLUE PRESET’ – this one gave it a nice moody base and a fun array of colours to work with.
After I applied the preset I went straight to my Basic settings and made some minor adjustments to the photo with those settings:
- Contrast: +10 (adds some depth)
- Highlights: +30 (bring out the flare behind the person)
- Shadows: -6 (show some detail around the darker edges)
- Whites: +23 (freshen up the image)
- Vibrance: -8 (adds some mood)
Here’s the before/after with these basic adjustments:
Next thing I do is play around the the points in the Tone Curve, I really love using this setting because it allows you to control certain areas/aspects of a photo. I usually like to bring up the point on the far left to add more fade to the image, which I really like doing in my other images.
Here’s is the final tone curve for this image:
The next one for me is a biggie. The HSL is a huge contributor to the style and general tones in my feed, and so I really love playing around with the hues in the image to get a nice aesthetic balance to the image.
The general colours in my photos are blues and oranges, so I try hard to bring those colours out in my photos. For this image it’s not too hard as both colours are quite predominant. Here are the final Hue / Saturation / Luminance settings for this image:
Here is what the before/image looks like after the HSL adjustments have been made and the tone curve slightly adjusted. As you can see, the image now has some vibrance, and a nice array of orange and blue tones.
For this image, I don’t make Split Toning adjustments as preferably that would be more for portraiture. I made some small Detail adjustments, for Sharpening (Amount = 15; Radius = 1,5; Detail = 30; Masking = 50) and for Noise Reduction (Luminance = 6; Detail = 50; Contrast = 0). This just makes the image a little smoother without losing any detail in the image.
That is the edit done! I hope you learnt a few tips/tricks for getting vibrant and moody tones in Lightroom! Be sure to check out my presets that are for sale, you will not regret it. It is a great starting point for edits and especially for the beginners who are not 100% sure on how or where to start with their Lightroom edits.
Thats it from me! If you have any other questions about the specifics, feel free to leave a comment below. I’d be happy to help. Also, don’t forget to check out this video for a close look at my Lightroom Presets.
Cheers, Kellan!