How to Edit Autumn Foliage in Lightroom Without Overcooking It

Most fall edits in Lightroom go the same way: you open a frame full of yellow leaves, push vibrance and saturation, and end up with something that looks worse than what came out of the camera. Warm hues clip and smear fast, and a heavy hand turns a glowing tree into a flat neon blob.

Pit Haupert leaves the global saturation and vibrance sliders alone entirely as he works through a sunset photo of a ginkgo tree in Vienna. His base edit is modest. He adds a slight lift in the shadows and whites, a bump in texture to pull detail out of the leaves, and clarity dropped to around -20 so the image blooms and looks less digital. At -100, clarity turns the scene dreamy to the point of exaggeration, and texture pushed too hard starts to resemble a phone image. In the tone curve, he raises the black point a little for grayer, more cinematic shadows, pulls the top end down a touch, and adds a gentle S-curve for contrast.

In the color mixer, Haupert starts by checking which colors are actually in the frame, then adjusts each one deliberately instead of lifting everything at once. Red gets a boost so a woman's dress stands out against the foliage. Orange dominates the scene, so its saturation comes down to about -15 to keep it from stealing attention from the tree. Yellow is the hero color, and it only gets a small saturation increase, with its hue nudged toward orange. Push that hue too far and the ginkgo stops looking like a ginkgo and starts looking like something out of science fiction. Greens and blues get pulled down, with green's hue shifted warmer and blue's moved toward teal, and the nearly absent purple and magenta get trimmed as well.

Stripping out off-season colors builds what painters call an analogous palette. Neighboring hues on the color wheel, here red, orange, and yellow, carry the image, and anything outside that range gets muted. The same principle works for any scene with a strong season or mood, such as winter frames with cyan shadows or spring scenes built on soft greens and pinks. Cool shadows paired with warm highlights, which Haupert creates with the RGB curves, is the look split toning used to handle. Adobe replaced the Split Toning panel with the three-wheel Color Grading panel in Lightroom in October 2020, and those wheels make an easier starting point if per-channel curves feel fiddly. The wheels divide the image into shadows, midtones, and highlights. The RGB curves let you place a tint at whatever brightness point you choose, which gives you finer control once you're comfortable with them. Practice on a photo that already has good bones, since a strong base makes it obvious whether a color move helps or hurts.

Haupert treats those curves gently, setting three points on each channel and making small adjustments. A subtle S-curve goes into red, a matching one into green along with a hint of green in the highlights, and blue gets added to the shadows. Most people, he says, skip these curves or drag them around like the brightness curve, and that's how an image gets wrecked quickly. The masking pass deals with two problems at once: light comes in from the right, and the left side of the frame is blown out. He draws a radial gradient over the sun and inverts it, which gives him a custom vignette he can move anywhere, unlike the standard vignette slider. Inside it, he darkens the corners, pulls down highlights and exposure, and lowers saturation. A second, non-inverted radial gradient then emphasizes the sun itself. Here he raises the shadows instead of exposure, since the sky is already bright enough to clip, and he dials in a negative dehaze value to add a bit of mist and mood.

How he pulls the tree back out of that glowing mask is in the video above.