Summer Pastel Colours - bring summer vibes to your photos

With the summer in full swing chances are good you already have plenty of photos to remember the fun time with your family and friends. Recently I stumbled upon an editing process (by Kyeler Steele on Instagram) to bring out the summer vibes in my images and I thought it’s a good opportunity for me to share it with you.

Summer pastel colours harmonize well with the natural sunlight and will even look more vibrant and pleasing. And for skin tones this colour palette is very flattering, reflecting light softly, creating a more even and glowing complexion.

In summary, summer pastel colours enhance the aesthetic, mood, and overall appeal of photos through their soft and harmonious qualities.

For a brief introduction on how to process photos efficiently check my Beginner’s Guide and for a Polaroid look check the block here.

Now let’s dive in the steps to make your summer photos pop!

Original

Final result

Basic Adjustments

The main focus of the editing will be around the colours but before we need to perform some adjustments to take out the harsh contrasts and to give the image a faded look.

Here are the basic adjustments on the General panel:

• Exposure: increase slightly +0.20 to brighten up the image. Be careful though with already overexposed or underexposed photos.

• Contrast: decrease -35 to avoid a harsh look.

• Highlights: -30

• Shadows: +60

• Whites: +20

• Blacks: +40

• Texture: +25

• Clarity: -10 to reduce the contrast even a bit more.

• Dehaze: +25

• Vibrance: +15 brings out the colours other than skin tones.

• Saturation: -5 to soften the colours.

Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks depend really on the overall exposure of the photo and should not be taken to literal. Set the sliders so that you get the desired look.

To enhance the effects even further go to the Tone Curve panel to move up the Blacks and lower the Whites.

Colour Adjustments

As mentioned above the main look and feel is coming from the colours. Pastels are lighter and softer in tone, which makes them the perfect palette to give images a bit of a dreamy look.

First start with the Colour Mixer panel and make sure it’s set to HSL, as you will adjust the Hue, Saturation and Luminance of the different colours. For the Summer Pastel look you will bring out the warmer colours like Orange and Yellow, but also the Greens and Blues. The Reds, Purples and Magentas on the other side will be muted.

Slider settings for Hue:

• Red: -10

• Orange: 0

• Yellow: +5

• Green: 0

• Aqua: 0

• Blue: -15

• Purple: 0

• Magenta: 0

 Next, work on the sliders for Saturation:

• Red: +10

• Orange: +5

• Yellow: +10

• Green: +25

• Aqua: +10

• Blue: +20

• Purple: -30

• Magenta: -30

Last, but not least adjust the sliders for Luminance:

• Red: -5

• Orange: +10

• Yellow: +5

• Green: +25

• Aqua: +25

• Blue: +45

• Purple: -10

• Magenta: -10

After the Colour Mixer panel, we turn now to the Colour Grading panel. Here choose a warmer tone like yellow or orange for the Global adjustment.

Get the Film Effect

As one of the last steps in the processing we will add some film effect through Grain. For this go to the Effects panel and modify the Grain sliders as follows:

• Amount: +25

• Size: +25

• Roughness: +50

Final steps

Once you’re happy with the final result export the photo like you normally do after editing photos. To add this look to other photos as well save the settings as a Preset.

With this guide for editing, you can bring summer vibes and a timeless look to your summer vacation photos. For sure this will help you remember the fun times with family and friends during this time of year. Happy editing!