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how to edit like Melli & Shayne

How this
image was
edited

Melli & Shayne

Adobe Lightroom Classic

M&S The Roots - Protea (Flat 3)

Two Men in Love - The Irrepressibles

Skills

Basic Panel, HSL Sliders, Effects, Radial Adjustment, Brush Adjustment, Gradient Brush, Spot Removal

This was one of the first images where we spend a significant amount of time on to really bring out the very best we could. So many things inspired me for this image, but mostly the warm sunset that was just out of frame and the way we framed the couple in the mountains with that cloud just on top. We had to find a balance between keeping the dynamic range of the image pleasing and the skin tones & textures to a more muted feel.

Breakdown

Each phase of the edit

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Straight out of Camera

This is the image straight out of the camera with 0 edits whatsoever.

Remove Grass on dress

First, before applying anything, we do a quick scan of the image looking for anything to remove with the Spot Heal tool. Here, we removed the grass on the dress.

Preset Added

We added our "Flat" variant of the Protea Presets. We noticed immediately that the edges became a bit too bright and the overall tones were muddy, dark, and gloomy.

Exposure Adjustments

We tweaked our exposure, shadows, highlights, whites, blacks, and clarity to get a better starting point.

Vignette

We still found the edges of the image too bright for our liking, so we added in a very large, feathered vignette to darken those edges to bring the attention to our couple.

Warmth & Skin Tones

We then warmed up the image with the white balance while paying attention to the skin tones.

HSL Tweaking

We noticed that the skin started to oversaturate so we jumped into the HSL panel and reduced the saturation in the Oranges & Reds, as well as dropped the luminance of those colors to make it feel more muted.

Further exposure tweaks

After adjusting the HSL, the image needed to have its 'pop' back, so we adjusted the exposure, highlights, and shadows again to find that feeling.

Sun Enhance

By adding a large radial adjustment to the right side of the frame with an increase in exposure, white balanace and saturation and a drop in the "dehaze", we were able to simulate a warm mist coming in.

Shadow Enhance

We then duplicated and inverted the sun enhancement radial adjustment, expanded it and reset all settings and dropped down the exposure to introduce the darker tones.

Sun Pop

We then went back and added a final radial to where the sun was, to give it a bit more of a pop. We wanted to create layers of light instead of keeping it flat.

Sky Adjustment

We wanted to keep a tiny bit of the blues of the sky in the top left so we added in a graduated filter with a cool white balance and an increase in exposure to keep it from going muddy.

Ground adjustment

Since the ground was packed full of rocks and details, we wanted to soften it so that it didn't compete for attention in the image. We simply added another graduated filter, darkened the exposure and put the sharpness slider all the way to -100% to create a blur.

Further exposure tweaks

We continued fine-tuning the exposure and contrast of the image as more local adjustments that are added tend to influence the feel of the image as a whole.