How to Transform Colors in an Autumn Photo

Autumn photos usually come out dull straight from your camera. In this Lightroom tutorial, you'll learn how to shift autumn foliage using a tool that makes editing colors easier. I'll also give you a few tricks to achieving the maximum color intensity for your autumn photos.

Step 1

Go to the Color area and turn on the Color Mixer tool. We'll be using this to shift the foliage colors towards something more autumny.

Step 2

Click on the crosshair icon in the Color Mixer. This is the targeted adjustment tool and it lets you pick a color directly from your image.

You'll see a toolbar appear. Here, you can pick which setting the tool will alter. For this step, click on Hue.

Hover over the leaves and then drag right to make them appear more red. And just like that, your photo looks more autumn.

Step 3

You'll see that the hue setting has been changed for the color yellow. Manually adjust the saturation and luminance setting to fine tune the foliage.

Step 4

To make the colors more vibrant, increase the vibrance.

You can also try lowering the vibrance then increasing the saturation. This usually produces better results. You'll notice that the skin tones and grass aren't as vibrant.

Step 5

Finally, to make the foliage pop even more, you'll want to use the Dehaze setting.

Final Results

You're done! In just a few steps, you completely transformed an autumn photo and made it look even more autumn.

Autumn Lightroom Presets

To make your autumn photos more dramatic, you'll need to use the Autumn Enhancer Lightroom presets (free download). It uses profiles that lets you completely transform colors in ways you can't with Lightroom settings.