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LIGHT, COLOR, LUXE!

Achieving Light & Airy Perfection with the Luxe 3-Step Workflow

Whether shooting with your phone or a with a professional DSLR camera, we have a quick and easy
workflow for all of your light and airy edits! This workflow can be implemented in all versions of
Lightroom – both desktop and mobile! Dial in your exposure. Perfect your white balance. Apply your
preset. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3!

Light (Exposure) - Increase to brighten Color (White Balance)- Correct blue or Luxe (Preset) - Apply the preset of your
your image if underexposed. We do not yellow light for true-to-life tones. We choice for a one-touch Light & Airy edit
recommend increasing over +2.00EV recommend Auto for most cases.

Photo by: Ahmad Sweeney

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Step 1. Light
Exposure refers to the amount of light in your image.

Before After

Photo by: Callia Mexi

You can’t always shoot in an environment with perfectly balanced light, and that’s okay! But what
this means is that your exposure needs will widely vary between images. That’s why our Lightroom
presets don’t alter exposure settings – no two images share the same exposure needs. Setting
exposure should be done manually, with each image, before applying a preset. This is the first step of
your workflow. When manually setting your exposure, we recommend staying between +.20 and +.60,
if possible. We don’t recommend pushing your exposure beyond +1.00, because this often makes
the lack of data in your dark image too obvious (things may start to appear muddied or blown out,
especially for JPEG images). For high-quality RAW images you may get away with +2.00EV.
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Where is the Exposure setting in Lightroom?

Exposure is found under the Basic panel in Lightroom Classic, and the Light menu in Lightroom CC/
Mobile.

Lightroom Classic, Desktop Lightroom CC, mobile

Step 2. Color
White Balance is the process of removing unflattering or unnatural color casts (often the result of
image lighting), and replacing with clean and true-to-life whites.

Before After

Photo by: Jessica Jaccarino

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White Balance is easily adjusted using Lightroom’s automated settings, Luxe quick preset tools, or the
Temp & Tint sliders. For quick edits, we suggest using automated settings. The Lightroom auto white
balance feature is specific to image formats. For JPEG images, auto white balance options are “As
Shot”, “Auto”, and “Custom”. In addition to these three base settings, RAW images will also see
the following options: “Daylight”, “Cloudy”, “Shade”, “Tungsten”, “Fluorescent” and “Flash”. RAW
image formats come with additional options because there is additional data for the processor to work
with (vs JPEG formats). Custom white balance can be accomplished using either the Temp & Tint slid-
ers or the White Balance Selector tool (the little eyedropper icon next to your White Balance settings).
With the eyedropper, you simply select the place on the image with the most neutral toning available.

Where is the White Balance setting in Lightroom?

White Balance is found under the Basic panel in Lightroom Classic, and the Color menu in Lightroom
CC/Mobile.

Lightroom Classic, Desktop Lightroom CC, mobile

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To use the eyedropper tool to manually set white

balance in Lightroom Classic desktop, click on
the eyedropper tool as shown or press “W” on
your keyboard. Using the eye dropper, click on
any neutral point in your image (pure white, pure
black or any neutral gray in between). This will
manually set white balance.

Lightroom Classic, Desktop

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3. Luxe
Lightroom Presets are one-click editing solutions that make global changes to an image. They cannot
be stacked and should be applied alone or before using a tool or layer preset. Luxe light and airy pre-
sets change an average of 30-80 settings within your image to get you a clean, professional looking
edit in a single click.

Before After

Photo by: Jessica Jaccarino

The right preset for your image is the one that honors the image’s natural toning while softly boosting
and unifying those tones. Many of our customers find inspiration by setting Lightroom to before and
after previews and then clicking through different presets to test out different looks on an image.

Luxe Light & Airy Portraits, Vanilla White Preset

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Luxe Bright & Airy, Bright & Airy 06 Preset

Luxe Light & Airy, Ruby Soft Preset

Luxe Milk & Tea, Milk & Tea 01 Preset

Photo by: Calley Rodman , @raisingrodmans