Before & After #3 - Step by step photo editing tutorial with pictures

So today I am going to show a simple Lightroom colour edit and show how I brought my image from how it looked before to how it looked after. 

I want to make a note that I shot this image in natural light when the sun was setting so I got nice even light. When I took this shot the sun had gone down so it was a little dark. My goal here was to first brighten it up since the image was a bit too dark, and second enhance the colours that I wanted to stand out which was the blues & red/magenta. 

This one is not too long, so here we go! 

I started with this:

It was underexposed so brightened it a bit as well as added a bit of contrast.  The image still was very dark in places so I wanted to even out the light by bringing the shadows up and the highlights down a little, then added a bit of the blacks back in to my liking. 

I then did what I normally like to do with the curves tool and I clicked and pulled the blacks up from the bottom left corner straight up, to give that nice matte effect. On this image I did not do too much but depending on your image or the effect you want play around with this. I then also made an anchor point in the middle of the curve to bring the mid range tones down. This is what a lot of the VSCO filters do. 

I then got into the colours where I used the hue and saturation to get the colours adjusted how I like them. This is a fun area to experiment in. For this I wanted her dress to be more towards the red side of magenta so it was not so hot pink. I also moved the blue slider to the left a little bit to make any blues in the images have a more turquoise tone, but just a little bit. I then went into saturation and brought a few sliders to the left to make certain colours less saturated. I did this on the dress (red & magenta) as well as yellows. When I brought the yellows down it make my subject pop more and thats why I liked that. I try to do anything that enhances my focal point to make them pop out of the image. 

I liked the image how it was bit still decided to do some simple split toning. Also so I could introduce in on these tutorials. The effect you get from split toning is you can choose a colour for your highlights as well as a colour for your shadows. For this image I chose a very light/white blue for my high lights (sometimes I will choose white so I get nice crisp white highlights) and a light yellow for my shadows. I also brought the saturation down very low for both, I just wanted contrasting colours and for my shadows to feel warmer then they did before by adding the yellow. Again this is another area to play around in, I would create extreme effects that did not look good but it taught me what effects could be done here. 

Then there is the final image!

Done! I hope this is helpful and can assist you when you start editing your images in Lightroom . A lot of this can be applied in other editing programs as well, even apps have a lot of these editing capabilities.  

Please comment below and let me know what you think! Also if you have any questions or suggestions for further tutorials! 

@kristylynn <------ follow me if you like my stuff :)