How to Create a Lomo Effect Using Only Lightroom

The lo-fi, retro film look has regained a lot of traction in the last few years. There are two ways to get it: buy an old film camera on eBay or learn how to manipulate your digital images to achieve a similar look. Here's a great tutorial on the latter method. 

Coming to you from Phlearn, this helpful video shows your how to use Lightroom to take modern, crisp images, and give them that oversaturated, heavily vignetted look that is widely popular at the moment. While it's definitely a matter of taste and you should probably use such a style judiciously, even if you're just not into the throwback, following this tutorial will give you a lot of good practice in several Lightroom techniques, including using radial filters, split toning, adding distortion and grain, and more. It's also a good introduction to creating your own effects and saving them as presets, which will help you to develop your personal style and vastly increase your workflow efficiency by removing the need to perform the same type of edit on multiple photos over and over. It's a fun way to spend an hour or two tinkering with shots on a rainy day. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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2 Comments

awesome, I was on a project recently where they wanted this look. Thanks Alex

I find it weird and amusing that so much of modern, popular aesthetic in photo/video is dependent on replicating the tech deficiencies and user errors of the past, this being a perfect example, but then there's that "faded" look that's so popular now which is basically mimicking the results of photolabs doing their best to recover underexposed images.

I wonder if you'd given photographers from 40 years ago today's modern day sensors, if they wouldn't straight up shit themselves upon learning that we're using them to recreate everything that sucked about their cameras lol.