Spring Greens! Presets I use and how I tweak them

The other day I saw a post in a photo group, talking about how they don't understand why people desaturate greens. They edit their greens to be vibrant (neon in my opinion), and love it! It definitely made me realize as how vastly different we see things as human beings. I just can't get on board with neon green.

I use to struggle with editing greens. They would come out too yellow, or too blue. If I adjusted in Lightroom then it would change skin tones and other aspects of the image. I would try preset after preset after preset and my eyes would hurt trying to get that perfect green. Like I said, there is no right or wrong way to do this, and everyone will have a different preference on how their greens look. I strive for a warm, muted, but also rich green.

I'll walk you through my editing for this beautiful motherhood mini session in a field of lupine. I just can't ever get over the beauty of Washington State. It was an overcast evening, even a few drops of rain.

There was so much beautiful green here. I usually gravitate toward SMAL and Melo presets, but I found a preset that I've never used that was the perfect starting point for my editing. Don't feel bad if you have bought countless presets that you never use, you never know when one might work best! Also don't feel like you need to go and buy them all, you don't :) What's more important is learning how to expose an image correctly, and utilizing light!

I don't use the same preset 100% of the time. I believe you can achieve consistency and use different presets for each session. With different landscapes, outfits, skin tones, lighting situations, there's too many variables. I like different, and enhancing the unique colors of the photo.

The editing video is below, but the preset I used was Koolaus2 from Stormy Solis All Heart Access course. If you can take that course, DO IT. I ended up buying all two full seasons and it was 100% worth it.

In Lightroom, the image was cooler tone, because i like to add warmth in Photoshop where I can control the opacity, and even brush it off skin or certain areas if needed. I also added more contrast, and then desaturated the greens a bit.

I did use a hue/saturation layer to fix skin tones a bit too on other photos from this session. When contrast is added, it can create harsh red/pink/orange tones where there are shadows. That will be for another post though..

Watch me edit!

Thanks for following and I hope this was helpful and/or enjoyable!

XOXO

Heather