Create a Modern Orange and Teal Effect in Lightroom

In this video I show you how to create a cool, modern Orange and Teal effect for your images using Adobe Lightroom.

Time taken – under 2 minutes.

Here’s the video walk-through…

If you prefer to read rather than watch, here you go …

Starting Image

The first step is to set up the basic edits. We start with the whites and blacks.

BASIC SETTINGS

Open the BASIC settings panel and while holding the OPTION key on the mac (ALT key on Windows), adjust the WHITE slider. The image goes black, so slide it gently until some ‘patches’ begin to appear on the screen.

Now repeat this for the BLACK adjustment. This time the image goes white, so gently adjust until some patches appear.

TONE CURVE

Now we go to the tone curve and create a classic ’S’ curve.

Click once in the middle of the line to create an adjustment point. The move halfway between this new point and the top right of the line and click again. Then move halfway between the center post on the line and the bottom left, and click again.

You should have created 3 adjustment points roughly evenly spaces along the line.

Now go to the bottom left of the line and hover your mouse over the very end of the line. The cursor will change to an adjustment. Pull the line up slightly to lift the shadows in the image.
Now go to the other end of the line and pull the very end down slightly, just to reduce the highlights slightly.

Then slightly lift the first adjustment point you created (in the middle), and then again for the next point along upwards. Finally, slightly pull down the third point you created.

Your line should loosely resemble the letter S tilted onto its side slightly.

CALIBRATION 

Now to add the Orange and Teal effect.

Open the CALIBRATION panel and do this…

Push up the RED PRIMARY slider all the way to the right (+100). Pull down the BLUE PRIMARY slider all the way to the left (-100).

For both of these, pull down the saturation to somewhere like -60 or -70.

VOILA

That’s it, you are done. If you want to fine-tune your image you can open up the HSL Panel and play with the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance of the individual colors.

You can also use an Adjustment Brush to fine-tune specific areas of your image.