Create vintage pastel colours

Shift HSL values to achieve candy colours in Lightroom

What you'll be using

• Shadows & Highlights
• HSL / Color controls
• Contrast
• Whites
• Blacks

Shifting colour values has become a popular editing style these days because it can be used to create some unique retro effects. Creating vintage pastel colours works particularly well with bright summer images and street photography featuring bold colours. To make applying these effects even simpler, we'll show you how to create a Lightroom Preset, so you can easily reapply it in the future.

1 Starting adjustments

The first thing to do is to compress tones and massively reduce contrast for a hazy, vintage look. Set Contrast to -70, Highlights to -30, Shadows to +60, Whites to -70 and Blacks to +65. These settings stay the same for every image, but Contrast will be readjusted at the end.