Awhile back I wrote out a Photoshop tutorial on How to Create a Digital Lomo Look in Photoshop, and today I want to give a run through on how to get this same effect with Ligthroom. For those of you who don’t know about Lomography it comes from the former state-run camera maker LOMO PLC of Saint Petersburg, Russia. They created a camera called the LOMO LC-A Compact Automat camera, which was known for its unusually saturation and colors along with heavy vignetting and sometimes light leaks.

Here is a step by step guide to create a lomography look by using Lightroom.

1) First start in the Develop module under the basic tab and working with a RAW image. We will adjust the color temperature manually. Start with something around 3100 for the temp and -40 for the tint to get a nice green-blue tint to the image.

lomo-lightroom

2) Next lets adjust the contrast and bump it up a bit. I usually at least double the contrast from the default of +25 to +50 or more, in this case i’ll adjust it to +60.

3) We will also adjust the clarity slider all the way up to 100. This also adds contrast to the image along with adding a little bit of grittiness to the image. I’ll move this all the way up to +100.
lomo-lightroom2

4) Also we will want to really bump up the contrast even more so head on over to the Tone Curve section and change the point curve from Medium Contrast to Strong Contrast.
lomo-lightroom3

5) Next, lets change the tone. Click on the split tone section and start to adjust the hue in the highlights to give the highlights an extra yellow tint. I’ll adjust this to around 47 and then adjust the saturation of this to the full amount of 100. Now we have a pretty good lomo tone and contrast going on.

creating a lomo photo in lightroom

6) Now we will make a few adjustments to the grain and vignette to give it more a film look. Go to the effects panel on the left to make these changes. I’ll start by adjusting the grain up just a little bit to around 20. Then for the post crop vignette section change the style to Color Priority on the drop down list. Start to move the vignette amount slider down until you have a nice and heavy vignette. In this example I moved it down to -54.

Here is the before and after comparison. I hope you enjoyed this walk through. If you have any questions or want to leave a comment just leave a comment below. I have another free set of Lightroom presets coming soon that will have some cool Lomo style presets in them. Make sure to join our email list at the top right so you don’t miss that announcement.

lomo look in lightroom

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