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Two BEST Lightroom Tools for MORE CREATIVE Instagram Edits // Tone curves & HSL // Editing Tutorial
Ever wondered how a photographer edit an image on Instagram? Or how the filters are created? Two tools from Adobe Lightroom, tone curves & HSL, will allow you to create the exact look of your favorite Instagram pictures by lifting the shadows & making precise color corrections. This is a step-by-step tutorial for beginners that never used theses Lightroom tools in the past but want to step up their photo editing game. I demonstrate how to get this look in Lightroom Mobile as it's free to use with some minor limitations.
🔗 Lightroom Step-by-Step edit: https://lightroom.app.link/StDmxsrWecb
✨ WATCH NEXT ✨
- 64 MB mobile edit: https://youtu.be/60iktXOvAsw
- Sunset edit: https://youtu.be/VxHsi19V2BA
- Google Pixel 4a Review: https://youtu.be/7wNDXsDKoCg
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Intro
00:22 - Cropping & basic settings
01:13 - Tone curve
02:00 - Tone curve: Adding contrast
02:34 - Tone curve: Lifting shadows
03:24 - HSL adjustment (Mix tool)
05:57 - Comparing the result
06:17 - Final adjustment: Dehaze & Brightness
07:00 - Final Image
07:19 - Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
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good evening everyone welcome back to another photo editing tutorial if you ever scroll on instagram and wondering how a photographer got that result or how the instagram filters are created i'm going to show you two tools inside of lightroom mobile that they probably use to get this effect for those of you who are new to this channel i'm like ben mahalford a young photographer and filmmaker on a journey to become better at this art i publish a new video on photo editing techniques every two weeks so be sure to hit that subscribe button if you want to learn more how to edit your photos okay so now let's jump right into it so i already applied a crop to grow a bit faster instead of this in it i'm also going to apply auto settings for the lighting uh if you want to learn a bit more about how to adjust the lining i suggest you go watch my other previous videos where i go in more detail about my choices here but i'm still gonna manually adjust it a little bit so i'm gonna bring down the exposure a little bit more i'm gonna leave the contrast like this we're gonna see another way of controlling contrast that is a lot better i'm gonna bring down the highlights quite a lot i'm gonna bring up the shadows uh just to add more dynamic range and then i can bring down the whites a little bit too and bring back up uh the blacks because i don't want them to be as contrasty as they were then i'm gonna go in one of the most useful tools inside of lightroom and when i started using lightroom i was really scared to use it because it kind of seemed complicated and it's also really easy to go too far with that tool and make the picture look worse instead of making it look better this is probably one of the most important tools to know about so i want to talk about it with you right now and it's the curves option here it's also what's called tonal mapping so if you hear these terms they mean the same thing here and you get a chart here where on the bottom left corner here these are pure black so that means on this axis and this axis this is a pure black and at the top corner here this is pure white so what this allows to create is first of all one thing that a lot of pro photographer talks about which is the s curve so you can bring contrast by bringing this down here and creating a s serv s curve inside of your curve right here so when i see this now s here and now you have a lot of control on how much contrast you can add and you can decide you want to have more contrast and the mid tones more contrast in the darker tones so you can really control it as you wish be careful not to go too far really small adjustment can make a huge difference on the shot but this is a better way of adding contrast to your shot then the second thing here that we're gonna use is to lift the shadow so you probably hear this expression before lifting the shadows and this basically means that you're gonna take the blacks and you're gonna make them more white in the end so that's simply what's lifting the shadows and this is a very very popular effect and instagram filters so we're simply gonna see if you look at the darks here dark parts here of the picture we're gonna take our blacks here and we're gonna lift them up and make them more white so they're going to not be as black as pure black anymore so this is how a curve works i'm not going to go through the other curves here i might just adjust it a little bit more and i think something like this is looking pretty good now uh we can click on done we're gonna go inside of color here and now instead of adding uh some saturation or some vibrance on everything we're gonna go inside of the second most useful tool i think inside of lightroom that most effects use on instagram and it's the mix tool right here so if you come inside of here it allows you to change different colors and this is what you call the hsl section inside of lightroom so it stands for hue saturation and luminance if you don't know what these terms mean hue is basically how color looks like so you can make your red look more like pink or more like a orange in here saturation is how much the color is intense so it can be less intense or more intense and luminance is if it's lighter or a brighter or darker in the end um so we're going to come here and we're going to apply one effect here to play with the colors because i think there's a little bit too much green in this shot i want it to be more orange and yellow because fall colors are usually more orange and yellow so if you want to get a fall look inside of here we can come inside the greens take our hue slider and move it towards the yellows here and then we can go inside of yellow and do the same take the slider and move them towards the orange in this case and we're gonna see that the colors inside of the trees changed quite a lot uh right now we might bring the saturation up also on the yellow so i'm just gonna come here oops if i can get it okay here i'm just going to bring up the saturation on the yellow because i don't want the whole picture to be more saturated saturated but i want the yellows which are the color that i prefer in this shot to be a bit more saturated there's also an option to point colors on the shot to select them and change them individually so we can come here and select on hue and i'm going to use this to change the color of the water so if i press on the water here and i move it i can change the hue of the water so you can see i can make it purple or i can make it more teal so i'm going to go a little bit more teal here not too much i don't want it to be too much but here we're going to get what's uh called a teal and orange look inside of the shot so this is a pretty popular look in most things because these are complementary colors so it looks pretty good when you have a little bit more teal and more orange in the shop so this is how you use two of these more advanced tools to modify completely the look of the picture so now if we go back to the picture and we look at the original one i don't know why it doesn't show the original one with a second if we go into versions here and we look at the original one the current one you can see it's quite a difference between the two so we're going to go back in the menu here there's another edit i want to do just to finish it off and it's going inside of effects here we're going to add a little bit of dehaze because um even though it looks like a perfectly blue sky day there's still a bit of haze because the mountains were pretty far so you wouldn't see as well so just adding a little bit of dehaze here helps to bring back a little bit more of this contrast in the shot and just make everything look a little bit better uh in the end so this is the final edit i might go back just as usual go back inside of exposure here bring back the exposure up a little bit maybe bring the highlights down even more and yeah now we have our very stylized final edit in the last few videos i've been using my google pixel 48 with lightroom on it to edit the photos but i would love to know if you would prefer that i use an ipad my laptop or another photo editing software for the next videos if you want to see more of the hike i did when i took this shot you can head over to my instagram where i have an instagram reel and more pictures of that hike as usual if you enjoyed this video please leave the like below it really does help the channel and also hit that subscribe button to be notified when i create another following tutorial see you in the next one bye you
Video Links
- 🔗 Lightroom Step-by-Step edit
- 64 MB mobile edit
- Sunset edit
- Google Pixel 4a Review
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
Ever wondered how photographers achieve that polished look on Instagram? In this tutorial, I'm breaking down two of the most powerful tools in Lightroom Mobile—tone curves and HSL adjustments—that let you create the exact aesthetic you're chasing.
If you've been intimidated by these tools, this one's for you. I walk through everything step-by-step, starting with basic crop and lighting adjustments, then diving into how curves work. The tone curve is honestly one of the tools that scared me when I first started using Lightroom, but once you understand it, it becomes invaluable. I show you how to create that classic S-curve for contrast control, and more importantly, how to lift your shadows—that effect you see everywhere on Instagram where the darkest parts of an image get brightened up, adding dimension and that soft, processed look.
Then we move into the HSL section (Hue, Saturation, Luminance), which is probably the second-most important tool for creating Instagram-style edits. This is where you get granular control over individual colors in your image. In this example, I adjust the greens toward yellow, enhance the yellows toward orange for fall tones, and even add a subtle teal shift to the water—creating that popular teal-and-orange look with complementary colors. You can use the mix tool to target these colors across the whole image, or point directly at specific areas and shift them individually.
I finish with a touch of dehaze and brightness adjustment to really polish the final result. The difference between the original and the edited version is striking—that's the power of understanding these two tools. Since I'm using Lightroom Mobile here, everything in this tutorial is free to use (with minor limitations), so you can follow along on your phone right now.