One of the most popular editing effects right now is pushing digital images to look more like film photos. Digital has taken over the world, but film has a “look” that’s just hard to match. I would certainly advocate going out and shooting some rolls of film, but if that’s not a possibility, we can use Lightroom to apply a vintage film effect using the tone curve.

The tone curve scares some users away because it’s not like anything that they’ve ever seen before. It’s a graphical representation of the photo, and it’s not necessarily logical. Let’s take a look at how to use it.

• First of all, go ahead and pick an image to work with and enter the Develop module.
• Now, feel free to apply any other tweaks that you need to – exposure, clarity, temperature, etc.
• Okay, scroll down the right panel in the Develop module and you’ll come to the Tone Curve. This has the secret sauce for what we want to do.

Here’s what my tone curve looks like to begin with:

Looking pretty flat right now right? What we want to do is add some control points that we can shape this curve with. To add these points, all we have to do is click where we want the points. I added three points; this is how I positioned my points:

Okay, now we’re ready to have fun. Let’s talk a little theory here. Right now, we’re starting with a default tone curve. The point at the lower left hand corner represents the black areas of the photo. The point in the upper right hand corner represents the “whites” of the photo. As we move these points, we’re pushing the blacks to grey, and likewise for the whites. You’ll see what I mean here in a moment.

So here’s my starting image:

Now, to start playing with the image, I’m going to grab the lower left hand corner point, and start dragging it up. I pull it up until it flattens out.

See what happened here? In the upper right corner, you can see how my curves look at this point. Compare this to the earlier image, and you can see that the black areas of the photo are pushed to greys. That’s what playing with the tone curve does!

Now, let’s play with the upper right hand corner. Here’s what we get:

Now, we’ve pushed the white area – represented by the upper right hand point, down to the greys as well by dragging it downward.

I really like the effect that this provides. It kind of “mutes” the photo and reduces the contrast, and reminds of the film photos that I grew up around.

Of course this can be done with a free lightroom preset as well.

Hey again Lightroom Lovers! One thing that a lot of users have written into me about is the idea of outsourcing their image editing. This means taking your images and sending them to someone else to handle the edtiing process. It’s becoming increasingly

Because this is a Lightroom blog, I’m going to encourage you to learn Lightroom and handle your editing in-house. The less that you depend on other people for your success, the greater freedom that you have. Handling your own editing also ensures that you’re going to get it done the way that you want it (assuming that you know how to accomplish it).

But let’s face it. Not everyone has time to learn Lightroom from front to back. If you”re busy building your photography business, and it’s taking you 8 hours to edit a portrait session (or if it feels that way :D) it might be time to explore outsourcing.

You see, it’s all about how we can best use our talents. If we’re bad at editing and our time is best spent promoting the business and keeping more clients booking shoots, isn’t it best to focus on that and turn over the editing? Again, I think learning Lightroom is a fantastic idea, but we don’t all live in an ideal situation.

If you decide to outsource, who should you choose? There’s a number of great options out there that accommodate photographer’s needs based on turnaround time, image load, etc. For the last couple of years, I’ve been slowly doing outsourced editing for a handful of photographers, so I can share my views on this.

The best part is that I can return either finished JPEG’s, or a completed LIghtroom catalog for photographers to handle the exports. All of my edits are completed in 72 hours, and I promise satisfaction. For big things like weddings, I have photographers send a hard drive to me, but we also can do digital transfer. I have a lot of clients who reclaimed their lives and grew their photography business by  turning over their editing to me.

Have you tried outsourcing your editing? Why and who did you choose? Tell me more about your thoughts in the comments below.