There are many editing styles out there, however, one of the most popular artists is Brandon Woelfel. If you don't know him you should definitely go check out his work on instagram. In this mini tutorial we will be using adobe lightroom, however if you watch the video below and check out our youtube channel you can see how his style can be achieved in more detail! Better still, if you want to edit like Brandon Woelfel, but don't have the time to learn, we have compiled an awesome preset pack for you that you can go ahead and purchase from this LINK.
One of the most important things to take into consideration when editing like Brandon Woelfel, is first, you need to take photos like Brandon. This can be challenging but i've compiled a small list that can help, if you take aspects of this list you cant really go to wrong.
I'm not going to go into too much detail, however, we start by importing our photo into Adobe Lightroom. From here i recommend focusing first on the Basics panel. I have summarised the following steps into a list to make this easier to follow
The tone curve is one of the most important tools within Lightroom. Today, we will be using a simple 'S' curve, this will introduce a small amount of contrast back into the image, but at the same time make it pop a bit more. Follow the image below:
If your not familiar with these sliders, heres a brief insight. Hue: will allow you to adapt each colour, editing the hues, ie, making greens more brown or reds more orange etc. Saturation: doesn't require much explaining, will change the saturation of each colour. Luminance: this will change the exposure of each colour, making them brighter or darker. For this edit follow these steps:
As for the saturation and luminance, play with these, but as a basic rule of thumb, desaturate the blues a little, although this is the main colour you don't want it to be overpowering. For luminance, he tends to make the blues brighter in his images.
This is a simple, and usually, minor tweak you can add just to finish off the image. In effect, it will add a colour to your highlights and and a separate one to your shadows, then the saturation is adjusted. For this edit, i tend to go with blues and oranges, adding some blue to the highlights, with saturation from 5-15% and some oranges/purples to the shadows with the same saturation.
This step isn't always necessary, however, when we examine Brandon Woelfels images we can detect a small hint of orange and teal in many of his images. If your new to this O&T is a famous colourgrade used in many feature films and is also a popular choice for many artists. It gives a very realistic effect to an image. To achieve this effect we increase the red hue and decrease the blue hue, very similarly to the HSL sliders, it just gives us some more room to play.
And thats basically it, replicate this for many images and you are done! I will take this time to mention that these presets will only work to their full potential if all the factors in STEP 1 are followed. That being said, you can still tweak them to your desired look.
I hope this mini tutorial was worth it, don't forget to checkout the in depth video, and you can buy the pack HERE.