How To Edit Minimalistic Photos in Lightroom

Hey how’s it going everybody welcome back to the channel today we’re gonna be real quick we’re gonna jump right into it because uh if i’m gonna be completely honest i wanna watch the warriors game in 30 minutes uh well actually before we jump into the editing bay i just really want to emphasize that this is the way that i edit it’s not like the law of the land you could do whatever the heck you want at the end of the day but also like it really does matter more about your composition and whatever you put into frame because you can’t edit a crappy photo by just smacking on like an edit and you know hoping for the best that it’ll change some bad composition into a good photo you have to really consider like what you’re putting in front of your camera because it doesn’t matter if you’re shooting with a 45 megapixel camera with the latest sensor if you’re not composing a right photo or putting the right things in it then it’s it’s going to be bad no matter which way you edit it.

So just want to say that first and foremost the minimalistic compositions come down to the compositions and the edit and the color palette comes secondary or tertiary so without further ado let’s jump into the editing bay all right so we have our first photo right here which is just a picture of the sand dunes at ocean beach with this uh kind of a barricade that’s buried by the sand so right here already we have a nice minimalistic composition we have the sand dunes as one element the sky is another element i guess that like mound of like ice plants over there as another element you see this like concrete foreground we’re already going to start cropping that out because that’s too much going on that’ll be a fourth element sweet spot is always three so that’s good we’re gonna get rid of that bottle in the bottom left corner but uh the way that i start is i’m gonna see if just bumping up the exposure would get rid of a lot of colors that i don’t want so right here just brightened up it’s already looking pretty good i’m not looking for any like crazy edit because for minimalistic stuff you don’t want to go too crazy.

So just bumping up the exposure starts to eliminate some of the dirtiness of the sand so we will keep it right around here 0.7 um i like to have softer texture especially in sand so clarity will go down negative 12 texture will go down negative 10 and this is like where the magic happens this is like where i keep referring to flatten the light guys flatten the light so with the s curve right here that’s where all the magic happens so i’m going to put a middle point right there and uh if you guys don’t know what this does um if you see like this whole grid right here the histogram is shown behind it if you have the latest version of lightroom and all the values are like up in the highlight uh area because this photo is very bright so if you make another anchor point where the highlights are if you crank that up then you’ll see like what happens and then if you put that back or just control z yeah so that all goes away so down here in the bottom left corner that’s where you like start to manipulate your shadows you can like raise the black point to like um have like a more faded look in the shadows um but obviously like if i like do anything like up and down here like nothing’s really happening too much in the shadows but it’s getting brighter.

Because it’s bending the highlight part up so we’re not gonna have to deal with that and so i’m gonna start off right here i’m gonna raise up the highlights just a little bit to brighten it up again and this is the part where i mean flatten the light grab the bottom i mean top right corner bring it down and this is when it starts to like flatten out everything it’s bringing the white point down essentially that’s what it’s called so when you bring the white point down it starts to clip highlights and by clipping the highlights it actually like softens the hell out of it and makes it look a lot more flattered gets rid of a lot of depth in the highlights so that’s really good we’re already off to a pretty good start this is the before this is the after it’s already looking pretty good i kind of want to bring back some of the yellow i think right here is good yeah right there is fine luminance is like controlling the brightness of the color channel.

So kind of want to brighten up the yellows leave the orange kind of like right there yeah that’s looking pretty good so far the greens over here are kind of distracting i don’t really want that color to be present so i’m just going to desaturate the green and to desaturate even further i’m going to up the exposure of it through the luminance channel for the green channel at least and then i don’t need to sharpen noise reduction will also smoothen it too so that’s usually what i do i bring the luminance up to 28 detail to 82 so now we’re going to get rid of that bottle in the bottom left corner because it’s kind of distracting so with the spot correction.

I’m just going to increase my brush size to the size of the bottle boom and it’s gone so now we have a nice soft really minimalistic composition not much going on but it’s a nice peaceful scene that’s good with me so and after before and after looks pretty good like that’s that’s like a super simple edit for a minimalistic type thing and you guys could probably like slap on this like editing setting for uh some of the minimalistic compositions that you guys have and you’ll be on your way easily okay if you have never seen this photo before you should click on the link over here because this was a fantastic portrait session with my friend jibby and we shot it in her house with the mamiya rc67 i think that was my first shoot with it and this is on the fuji pro 400h all these photos that i’m editing are filmed to like kind of show that it doesn’t always have to be like a crazy raw file and that you should stick within like a very minimal edit.

But we’re going to start cropping a little bit right here to strain out the lines you see that plant in like the left corner kind of want that out of there it’s not important so now we got a nice clean area to work with this film stock was uh exposed incorrectly so we have a we might have a little bit more to work with so let’s start by bringing down the shadows just a little bit there we go to have a nice contrast eliminate shadows in the detail or details in the shadows uh clarity down texture down exposure up already looking pretty clean i want those white walls to be flanned out more so again center point uh another point in the highlights let’s bring up the highlights yum yum yum yum yum bring down the white point oh yes yes yes yes yes um very good so far but it’s a little bit too blown out a little bit so i’m going to bring the highlights slider down just a little bit right here hopefully i’m not going too fast.

But if i am you can always rewind it beauty of youtube there’s a little bit of yellowness going on so i’ll desaturate that furthermore that so i want to bring out the color of her skin tone more so that that’s like kind of like the more hero uh color in this thing so that something is popping it was like the minimalist composition with a pop color that’s good bring up the saturation a little bit more looking pretty good looking pretty good yeah i’m happy with this i’m pretty happy with this it’s a nice contrasty type photo but the minimalist palette is there so you might be thinking chris these photos are already like just plain beach photos and like photos with like hardly any color in it which proves my point that it matters more about the composition.

How you set up the photo than it is about the edit the edit is secondary tertiary it kind of like is the cherry on top you can’t make the cherry on top the actual like entree of the photo so that’s kind of like the point that i’m trying to drive home but um yeah i hope you guys enjoy these edits these are super simple again not like as complex as like my other edits uh because i’m gonna be saving those for the preset pack that’s coming out i’m still working on it guys hopefully you guys learned a thing or two about editing the tone curve is probably like the hardest part about um editing there is because there is a learning curve no pun intended and split toning would be like the second thing that would be the hardest part but um don’t forget to thumbs up this video uh leave a comment down below about what you thought about this video and also subscribe and i will see you guys in the next post peace.