Designing a Color Scheme Preset in Lightroom
By Tanya Riseman, September 2023
I’ll show you some ways to shift the hue, saturation, and brightness of colors to make your images more dramatic.
Before taking a deep dive
Here are some simple ways to make a dramatic nearly Black-and-white image using hue shifts, adjusting luminance, and reducing saturation in Lightroom’s HSL/Color module.
A preset inspired by the movie Asteroid City
Wes Anderson’s movie Asteroid City debuted in June of 2023. Scenes in the film were often shot mid-day in very harsh lighting. In processing, the contrast was lowered dramatically, leading to a “flat”, soft look, in which the dark shadows almost disappear. The colors were manipulated by hue shifts that moved reds to an orangish red and blues moved towards teal, producing dramatic teal skies over a warm desert. Please watch the movie’s trailer to see the style.
I have created a preset in Lightroom to reproduce the visual color design of Asteroid City. Below are before and after shots of a test image analyzed using the web app Image Color Wheel (https://swsrn.github.io/image-color-wheel/ or https://editor.p5js.org/risette/full/MGd3G6dnl and described in https://www.ssccphotography.org/explore-the-color-wheel-and-color-harmony-of-your-image/ ).
The original test image shows a full spectrum of colors in the color wheel. The final image has had the blues rotated to teal. The purples were pushed to blue and magentas were pushed towards red. Both were desaturated to downplay them. Red was moved towards an orangish-red. The result is colors spanning red, yellow, green, and teal (cyan), on roughly half of the color wheel. Note that the church and the dinner’s yellow paint have warmed up while the blue shadows have become teal.
This Asteroid City preset uses a variety of Lightroom features, two generally familiar and one not. It employs three modules: HSL, Basic, and Tone Curve.
Before Applying the Preset
The “before” test image is below. It is a good idea to adjust the white balance if needed before applying the preset. Note that this histogram reaches all the way from white to black.
Preset Parts – The HSL module
The first step is to adjust the colors using the HSL sliders – this is perhaps 60% of the preset’s look. Crank the blue way over towards cyan. Make red a bit orangish. Adjust the other hues and luminances to make a rough arc so Lightroom renders colors smoothly and without artifacts like banding. Exceptions are yellow, which is offset a bit to make it pop, and suppression of the purples and magentas. Fortunately, purple and magenta are uncommon colors.
Preset Parts – The Basic Sliders
We create a low tonal contrast by using the very familiar Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks sliders in the Basic module as shown. (We are saving the Contrast slider for later.)
Preset Parts – The Tonal Curve Module
Lastly, we use the Tone Curve module, which is generally pretty difficult for all but old-timer experts. Don’t worry, we are going to use it in a very simple way! We adjust the tone curve to be a straight line that’s at a lower slope than the diagonal. This pushes the left-hand side of the histogram away from pure black and pushes the right-hand side away from pure white. (For more experienced users: this is sort of the opposite of how black points and white points are generally used.) The histogram is now narrower than before and the image looks “softer”. This also has the effect of lowering the tonal contrast even more. Compare the more compressed histogram to the wide histogram in the “before” screenshot.
The Whole Preset
Together, these three modules and their settings make up the Asteroid City preset. You can find a zip file of this Asteroid City preset here which was used in most of the images in this article.
For full instructions on using, creating, importing, and exporting develop presets in Lightroom, please see Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost’s blog entry https://jkost.com/blog/2023/03/21554.html . When saving your own preset, you need only check off the items that you adjusted (see below for this preset).
Tweaking the Image After Applying the Preset
To start, don’t touch anything that we set in the preset. All you should need to adjust is the exposure and contrast. Since different pictures naturally have different tonal contrasts, you should adjust the Contrast slider to taste. Even the movie Asteroid City has different amounts of contrast in different scenes.
Example Photos using the Asteroid City Preset
These skyscrapers were photographed on a sunny day, mid-day (2:10 PM). (iPhone 2nd generation, Hartford, Connecticut). The shadows have been softened a lot. Note how the resulting Red-Yellow-Blue color wheel shows a color harmony of complementary colors.
The Florence Massachusetts farmers market on a sunny day, late afternoon (iPhone 2nd generation). Note that the resulting RYB color wheel shows the color harmony of three legs of a square color scheme.
You don’t have to restrict yourself to harsh lighting conditions to use this preset. This fair concession stand was photographed on a day with deep overcast skies, at 6 PM in August. (iPhone 2nd generation, Cummington, Massachusetts) This one also has a final RYB color wheel with the color harmony of three legs of a square color scheme.
This is a worst-case scenario, with a dark scene dominated by purples and magentas. This circus shot was taken on a Canon T5i, in very dark conditions at the 2017 Smithsonian Folk Art Festival. The preset collapses deep blue and purple to teal; and magenta to red, but not quite as far as we would like on the color wheel. Of course, Wes Anderson probably avoided these colors when designing the clothes, props, and sets for Asteroid City. You should too when using this preset, just to be on the safe side.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed exploring color and contrast. Perhaps you learned a bit about the HSL module and the more obscure Tone Curve module along the way. Have fun experimenting with the color. A good place to start is with the HSL module alone.