How To Create Film Inspired Edits In Lightroom

Film inspired looks are some of my favorites. I love the way details show while keeping an even tone and contrast on the whole portrait. If you love this look as well then you'll absolutely love this tutorial i'll be going over giving you an exact step-by-step on what adjustments need to be made to create this look. 

LOVE THIS LOOK? 

Want to create beautiful consistent work then take a look at the Lightroom Film Preset Collection. The three images below are three of the presets from that collection and it saves me so much time being able to create this look with one click! 

FREE TUTORIAL ON CREATING FILM INSPIRED EDITS IN LIGHTROOM

EXPOSURE ADJUSTMENT

First adjustment I'll make is bumping the exposure of the whole image. I love the bright and airy feel that comes with film so brightening up the image is first on the list. 

COLOR BALANCE ADJUSTMENT

Next we're going to warm it up a little bit by moving the color balance slider over from blue to yellow. You can see that only moved it over by 3 but it makes all the difference! 

CONTRAST ADJUSTMENT

To create that beautiful soft look I moved the contrast slider over -30. You can see how that softens the entire image but still keeps details such as eyes, lips etc more contrasted than the rest. 

HIGHLIGHTS & WHITES ADJUSTMENT

You notice how with the increased exposure and lowered contrast we lost some of the details that were originally already bright to begin with? On the left side of her face. These areas are too bright since we no longer see the details there. A quick way to get those back is to bring down the highlights & whites. You can see how once we did that, the really bright areas have detail again. 

CURVES ADJUSTMENT

To add that beautiful 'airy feel' to the image I'll do a curves adjustment. You see how i'm dragging it from the bottom corner instead of the center? that is that adds that 'white light' to the image. 

YELLOW SATURATION ADJUSTMENT

Just looking at the image I see a lot of yellow hues. I want to remove some of those by moving the yellow saturation slider down a little. This will take any yellow hues and desaturate them. 

SHARPENING & NOISE REDUCTION

I love nice tack sharp images. You can see I moved the sharpening slider up and then to 'smooth' out anything moved the noise reduction slider up. 

EYE SHARPENING

I always want to make sure that the eyes are the sharpest. For this I do a local brush adjustment so I can make an adjustment to a specific part of the image instead of the whole image. You can see the brush button at the top right corner, click that and then click on an eye and start painting. (you can hit "o" to see where you have painted, it will highlight in red. Then hit "o" again to hide it). You can see the adjustments I made was sharpening more, bringing contrast up a little etc.) 

RED CURVE ADJUSTMENT

I want to warm the whole image up a little bit. I do this by going into the curves and changing it to the 'red' and then bringing that up a TINY bit. (careful not to bring it up too much!) 

GRAIN ADJUSTMENT

And it would be right without a little bit of grain added to it. I personally love the texture it adds to the entire image. If you're not a fan of that extra grain you can simply not do this last step. 

That was the last step of the tutorial. I hope this helps some of you in learning how to create beautiful film inspired looks. I know it's a lot of little steps. If you really love that film look then I HIGHLY recommend downloading my Film Inspired Presets which come with 40 presets to help you create this sort of look with one simple quick click!