Desaturate in Lightroom

June 20, 2007
 

Digital cameras can produce highly saturated images, especially when contrast adjustments are made later in programs like Photoshop. Desaturating an image can make the colors more natural or pleasing.

Final image Canon 5D, 24-105mm f/4 L lens at 35mm ISO 400, 1/125 sec, f/8

To get the photo to look like this, I made a handful of adjustments in Adobe Lightroom. Before I get to those, here is what the photo looked like without adjustments.

Original image

The first adjustments were minor tweaks to the White Balance and Exposure. But I still felt the color wasn't quite right. By dumb luck I had fooled around with the Camera Calibration sliders earlier and found negative values on the Green Hue and Green Saturation sliders gave me a look I preferred. I don't know why it works nor do I think it will work for all images. But it worked for this one.

I next went to the Tone Curve sliders and tried my usual 'S' curve (increase the Lights and decrease the Darks and/or Shadows). The Darks adjustment went too far so I ended up increasing that value from the default. Along the way, I also reduced the Brightness slider in the Basic panel.

Finally, the other adjustments I made were to the Vibrance and Saturation sliders. When increasing contrast via the Tone Curve sliders, saturation can sometimes appear too garish. Since digital cameras seem to render too much saturation to start with (especially for skin tones), I often reduce either Vibrance or Saturation. In this case, reducing both by about the same amount gave me the image I wanted.

For the last step, I added some vignetting.