Adobe Lightroom (Lr) provides sufficiently good features to post-process images. Though I have a Photoshop CC subscription, unless I am doing advanced manipulations, Lightroom is a quicker option to experiment with image tone and color grading. It provides a ton of presets for transformations, but I usually build my custom edits, since every preset output has a different effect based on the base image. One such customization which has been always my favorite is creating dark moody effects. Let’s walk through the simple steps and explore some excellent features Lightroom has to offer.
This is a picture I snapped from an iPhone 11 a few years back from the Microsoft campus. As you can see, it was a perfectly bright day with a colorful outdoor ambience.
The first step was to get some contrast and shadows to make the picture pop out. The highlights also help in that, but I do not overdo it.
Step 2 is the key manipulation. The idea is to desaturate the picture by removing all color elements except a few of interest. Think about a dark environment where bright colors die out. So I use the color mixer to remove the saturation of most of the colors, especially green. Depending on your image subject, you can experiment with the colors on which ones to preserve or eliminate.
A recent feature introduced in Lightroom is the eye dropper color selection too which can be put to even better use. One can select the exact color point from the image, and modify the saturation. I did that for this image subject, to desaturate a bit of the building color.
Next, bring in some clarity and dehaze the picture. This works well outdoors with trees especially to pop some details. This is important because the darker the image gets, it loses some of the visible clarity.
Any image manipulation is incomplete without curve adjustment. Though I didn’t need to do much here, softening the black is something I do a lot to create the Instagram effects. What that means is, making the full black point in the image lighter and hazier as shown below.
I did not touch any color grading to make the image any cooler or warmer at the mid-tones, shadows, or highlights.
Next comes some cool AI features. I selected the sky detection mask that auto-detects the sky region in the picture. Once selected, you can apply transformations on the selected/masked region. I chose to dull down the bright sky through exposure reduction and create more of a cloudy dark effect.
Finally, I created another radial gradient mask around the floor surface to decrease the exposure and contrast a bit, to keep it consistent with the other parts. The different mask options provided by Lightroom are versatile, so don’t shy away from experimenting with them, from linear to radial, or the AI detection for regions like subject or sky.
So that is all. And we get this final version!
