Creating Vibrant Tones in Lightroom with Kellan Hendry

Learn how to add vibrant and moody tones in Lightroom with this photo editing walkthrough from Kellan Hendry.

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!

creating vibrant and moody tones in lightroom with kellan hendry

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:

Lightroom Editing Walkthrough with Kellansworld

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:

tone curve adjustment in adobe lightroom

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:

HSL Lightroom

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.

vibrant lightroom edits with kellan hendry

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.

Beautiful harmonious tones and Lightroom Presets by Cape Town photographer Kellan Hendry.

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!

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