Citrus premium Lightroom preset is designed to give your photos a stylish summer look and feel. The preset produces rich warm hues and complex skin tones, making it perfect for your beach photos. We tested the preset on a lot of travel and vacation photos, so you do not have to worry about lighting and tricky weather conditions.
Collection: Warm Presets, Beach Presets
Best for: Beach Photos, Outdoor, Coasts
Style: Warm Yellow Tint, Airy, Warmer Colors
To make sure that all your beach photos would look coherent, we also created a specific tropical motif. This means that, once you apply this preset across several photos, they would look cohesive and perfect on a social media feed. This is exactly why this Citrus preset is ideal as an Instagram filter!
Brightens Images Like Sunlight
Bright and Warm. To create a relaxed summer vibe, we made sure to recreate the look of sunlight. The result gives off a hot and sweltering feel, too.
The base of this preset is a blend of warm color temperature and a moderate increase in exposure. As you can observe in the After photo above, the woman’s beach portrait looks more illuminated, as though there is more sun. We also apply some fine adjustments in luminance to make the skin tones look even more radiant.
Lastly, notice how these simple settings transform the photo’s atmosphere. The golden warm tones elegantly add to the overall tropical aesthetic.
Softens Tones for an Airy Summer Feel
Gentler Lighting. Citrus Summer’s relaxed atmosphere partly comes from its softened tones. We narrow tonal range for this purpose; this means that the preset subdues light regions and lightens the dark ones. We then refine these settings in the tone curve. As a result, you get gentler and more diffused lighting, without harsh highlights or shadows.
Optimizes Colors and Skin Tones for Beach Portraits
Summertime Portraits. Skin tone is important in any kind of portrait. For this preset, we made sure that the skin tones retain their natural look, despite the warmer tones through the image.
This involves several fine adjustments in saturation, vibrance, and contrast. We first lighten hues by lowering saturation and contrast levels. This allows for finer adjustments.
From here, we then moderately increase vibrance and clarity. Both of these parameters affect midtones, including skin tones. Refining these also adds some definition throughout the image. Notice how these adjustments balance out the preset’s lightened tones.
We retain the warm color temperature by also refining red, orange, and yellow colors in Lightroom’s HSL panel. We increase the saturation of only red and orange, and refine yellow hues to match our intended summer aesthetic.
Pulls Colors to Warmer Shades
Orange and Aqua. We use a specific range of colors to define Citrus preset’s unique motif. Everything is done in the HSL panel: we convert most of the colors to warmer shades. You can easily observe the result in the After photo above.
Examine how we pull warm colors towards orange tones. On the other hand, we pull cool colors to aqua. This more sophisticated warming produces a tighter and more complex summer aesthetic. Skies and sea appear lighter and more inviting now, while the rest of the beach or coast look infused by sunlight.
Citrus summer preset is for Lightroom Mobile, Desktop, and…
Like all our presets, you can absolutely use Citrus preset as is, right out of the box. With any preset, you might need to make adjustments to accommodate your specific camera, settings, lighting, and subject matter.
- Entirely Adjustable
- Compatible with Lightroom 4, 5, 6 and CC
- Performs with both PC, Mac, and Mobile
- Applicable to both RAW and JPG images
