Editing Fall Colors

It is the season of fall! I absolutely love the colors, sounds, and smells of fall. The warm hues of green, gold, orange, and red are beautiful to capture. At this time of year, there are beautiful opportunities to capture all of this color.  This post will share tips and tools to edit your fall images to enhance the season’s color. Using Lightroom Classic, I will share how to impact your fall color using the HSL panel, Color Masking, and Tone Curve. I will also share some fall presets that I created to help you edit fall colors. 

 I like to begin my color editing using the HSL panel. Using the saturation and luminance sliders, we can adjust the color tones of the image. I want to start by reducing the saturation of green and yellows and increasing the saturation of red and orange. This brings out the deep warmth of fall tones. Using the luminance slider, you can give the green and yellow tones a pop of brightness if needed. 

Next, we can use the tone curve to make small adjustments to enhance the image’s color. I like to use the tone curve to tweak the mid-tones in the image. By dropping a dot in the center of the tone curve, you can move the line up for brightness or down to deepen the image’s colors. This can help you add additional warmth to the mid-tone values of your image. 

Fall images look great edited with a matte finish. To achieve this look, you can use the tone curve. By raising the lower left end ( blacks) and lowering the upper right ( whites), you can create a nice matte tone curve. 

Often with fall images, you may have a small amount of color in the image, and you want to enhance just that specific color. The mask tools make it easy to impact selective color in your image. This video will show you how I use masks to enhance this image’s color.

Fall pre-sets are a quick way to make initial color edits to your images. They help set the stage for you to begin to make any other adjustments; they can also speed up your editing process.  Here is a link to a set of fall color pre-sets that I have made, along with loading instructions. The color pre-sets make initial edits to your images, but you can still make adjustments after applying the pre-set. They are a good starting point. 

As you are outside shooting this fall, note all the color tones and hues you see. As you edit the images, bring out those tones using some of the tips above. I hope you will try adding a matte look to your fall work and playing with the pre-sets. Enjoy this season!