Lightroom’s Secret Weapon for City Shots
I love to shoot in cities, and doubly so in lower light, such as blue hour or later. It’s the perfect combination of subject, light and color. You naturally have great leading lines too. But one thing I have found time and time again is that the colors from streetlights just don’t look that great a lot of the time. They look pale yellow to me - almost green at times - and I find it generally unattractive. So I have historically worked on that in my edits with color temp and tint to rebalance the overall look and feel of the colors. That can work on a lot of images, but not always.
Now that I am using Lightroom for more edits (I manage my catalog in LrC, as I wrote about here so I also edit frequently in LrC too), I have discovered that the Calibration tool is the perfect weapon to make these adjustments. Because Calibration gives you so much power, you can radically shift the overall color scheme in the photo without overdoing temp/tint changes or saturation.
It’s the perfect tool to achieve your vision with a city shot, and to balance out the overall colors while making them quite complementary. And it doesn’t produce over-the-top saturation when used carefully. In other words, the colors look natural and way more pleasing to the eye (to my eye, at least).
Want my free Lightroom Editing Guide? Get it here: https://jimnix.com/lightroom-classic-editing-guide
I did a video about this exact topic, which is below. Check it out, try it on your own shots, and let me know how it works for you! I hope it helps!
If you want to watch directly on YT, you can find the video here: https://youtu.be/y64yw8366f8
