How to get the light and airy look in Lightroom without washing out skin

What the light and airy look is made of

Couples ask for light and airy photos by name, and the name describes a feeling more than a recipe. Taken apart, the look has five parts, and each of them is set in a different place.

Notice what the table leaves out. Nothing in it requires an overexposed file, a faded black or a white balance pushed toward peach. Those are shortcuts, and nearly every problem with the style starts with one of them.

What light and airy presets get wrong

The first shortcut is overexposure used as a style. Push Exposure up a stop and the photo does feel bright, but every tone moves together and the top of the scale has nowhere to go. Once a color channel reaches its limit, in the camera or in the edit, the detail there is gone. On a face, red is the highest channel, so it reaches the limit first. The cheek stops getting redder while green and blue keep rising, and skin slides toward yellow and then toward white, which is what washed-out skin is.

The second is the lifted black. Raising the bottom of the tone curve turns the darkest tones grey, and for a moment the photo looks softer. It also removes the anchor that makes bright tones look bright. A groom’s suit turns charcoal and dark hair loses its depth. Brightness is relative: whites look clean when there is a real black to compare them with.

The third is what the first two do to color. As tones rise toward white they lose saturation, so the preset adds warmth to put some life back: Temperature up, a peach tint in the highlights. In soft shade that can pass. Under tungsten, or on skin that was already warm, it turns faces orange. Then Orange saturation is pulled down to calm them, and they turn pale. A preset built this way is balanced on one kind of light, and a wedding has six or seven.

Shoot for it: the look starts with the light

An airy photo is a photo of soft light. No edit turns hard noon sun on a face into window light, so most of the look is decided before the shutter. Four habits do most of the work.

• Put the sun behind the couple, or to one side, and let the open sky or a pale wall light their faces. The faces sit in even light and the hair picks up a rim.
• Look for large, pale surfaces: a white wall, a stone terrace, a sheer curtain, sand. They return light into the shadows and lower the contrast of the scene for you.
• Indoors, work near a window with the lamps in the room switched off, so one soft source lights the face.
• Keep heavy, dark backgrounds out of the frame when you can. A wall of dark trees behind the couple stays dark however far you lift it.

Then expose with care. Film photographers who worked in this style overexposed color negative film on purpose, because film compresses its highlights and tolerates the extra light. A digital sensor clips, and a clipped highlight cannot be recovered. The digital rule is to expose as bright as you can while the brightest white you care about, usually the dress, still holds detail. Check the histogram on the camera, and shoot RAW, which keeps highlight and shadow detail a JPEG has thrown away. The rest of the brightness is added later, where you control it. See what film does with highlights.

Start from clean color: profile and white balance

Clean whites are a white balance result before they are anything else. Click the White Balance Selector on the dress or a white shirt in the main light, then judge the face. In open shade expect a value near 7500 K, by a window with no direct sun around 6500 K, in sun or with flash about 5500 K. If you like the look a little warm, add a few hundred kelvin after you have found neutral, so you can move the same amount in every scene.

The camera profile sits under white balance and decides where skin and greens land once the whites are neutral. It matters more for a bright edit than for a dark one, because pale colors show a tint easily. A slight green lean in skin that hides inside a contrasty, saturated edit is plain to see in a soft, bright one.

This is where NIPIK starts. NIPIK Base is our set of camera profiles, one for each of 741 camera models, calibrated to match each other. Measured across all 741 cameras, skin lands about 31% and foliage about 38% closer to the true chart colors than with Adobe Standard. Greys stay neutral, so a white dress stays white as the frame gets brighter, and the brightening has clean color to work on.

Light and airy editing in Lightroom, step by step

Work in this order on one frame from a scene, then sync the result to the rest of that scene. The numbers are starting ranges for a correctly exposed RAW file in soft light.

1. Profile and white balance. Choose the profile at the top of the Basic panel, then set white balance on something neutral, as described above.
2. Exposure. Raise it until the face is as bright as you want it, often by 0.3 to 0.7 on a file exposed to protect the dress. Judge the face only. The whites are handled next.
3. Highlights. Bring them down, to somewhere between minus 30 and minus 60, until the dress shows its fabric again. This is what lets the midtones be bright while the top stays intact.
4. Whites. Hold Alt (Option on a Mac) and drag Whites to the right until the first specks appear on the brightest fabric, then back off a little.
5. Shadows. Open them, by 20 to 40, until eye sockets and the folds of a dark suit read.
6. Blacks. Leave them near zero. Hold Alt or Option on the slider and check that something in the frame, a shoe or the shadow under a chair, still reaches black.
7. Contrast. Take off 5 to 15 if the scene is still hard. In soft light it may need nothing.
8. Tone Curve. For more air, lift the middle of the curve slightly and leave both ends where they are. Midtones brighten while black and white stay put.
9. Color Mixer. Lower Green and Yellow saturation by 10 to 20 so foliage sits back, and raise their Luminance a little if you want paler greens. Leave Orange alone until you have looked at skin.
10. Vibrance. If the frame now looks thin, add 5 to 10 of Vibrance. It acts most on the weaker colors and goes easy on skin, which the Saturation slider does not.

Keeping color in skin as the frame gets brighter

After those steps, look at a face at full size. A bright edit takes saturation out of skin, so the question is how much is left. Hover over a lit cheek and read the RGB values under the histogram. Red should be clearly the highest and blue the lowest, with green between them. When the three values crowd together, the face is going grey-white. When red reads in the high nineties, the cheek is at the limit and about to lose its color.

If skin is pale, look at brightness before color. Lower Exposure a little, or bring Highlights down further, and the color often returns by itself because the red channel has room again. If the face is still thin, a small rise in Orange saturation, 5 to 10, is safer than warming the whole frame.

If skin is orange, the cause is nearly always a white balance too warm for the light, or a face left too dark. Correct those first. Orange Luminance is the slider to know for this style: raising it by 5 to 15 brightens skin without brightening the room, so faces lift while the dress stays under control. It also brightens wood and sand, so watch the background. The full order for correcting skin is in skin tones in wedding photos.

When a correction should reach the people and leave the room alone, use a mask. Lightroom can select people and separate face skin from body skin, and each mask has its own Temperature, Tint and tone sliders. Riviera’s add-ons include two for this job: Fix - Orange Skin, for faces that have gone too warm, and AI - Subject Lift & Warm, which uses Lightroom’s own mask to lift and warm the people a touch.

Light that fights the look: noon sun, tungsten rooms and green lawns

Some light resists the look, and the edit has to change with it. Forcing one bright recipe onto every scene is how a gallery ends up with a clean ceremony and a milky reception.

A candlelit dinner is dark and warm, and that is why the couple chose it. An airy edit of a dinner lifts shadows until noise shows and the warmth turns grey. The style survives the evening as clean whites, soft contrast and natural skin, at the brightness the room really had. A gallery that is bright by day and warm by night, with the same skin throughout, reads as one consistent style. Each light of the day is covered in one wedding, six kinds of light. Riviera has a tool for most rows of that table: Fix - Harsh Light for noon sun, Fix - Green Cast on People for lawns and trees, and its own presets for the evening, Riviera - Reception for lamp-lit rooms and Riviera - Flash for the dance floor.

Whites: the dress, the shirts and the tables

Whites carry this look, and three things spoil them. One is a cast: a dress in shade under a blue sky turns blue, and beside a sunlit lawn its lower half turns green. White balance set on the dress handles the first, and a mask on the dress handles what remains. Another is clipping, which turns fabric into a flat shape. The Highlights and Whites steps above deal with that, as long as the file was not clipped in the camera. The last is a tint added by the edit itself, usually warmth in the highlights. Check for it with the RGB readout: a white in neutral light should show red, green and blue within a few points of each other. In Riviera, AI - Dress Clean White finds the dress with Lightroom’s own mask and gives a cleaner, brighter white.

A white that keeps its detail also needs somewhere to end. Leave the dress a little below pure white, so that a window, a reflection on glass or the sky can sit above it. A frame in which everything bright is the same white looks flat, however clean it is.

Where Riviera comes in, and how to take it brighter

Riviera carries the look of Danilo & Sharon, and its daylight preset stands on the same foundations as this guide: highlights stay soft, skin stays natural and whites stay clean. NIPIK looks are made with a technology we call DYNAMIK, which designs a look as a response to light. Skin stays soft in bright light, highlights ease into white, and blacks go deep without a color cast. The depth stays in the file, so the brightness has something to stand on.

BeforeAfter

To take a frame toward a lighter, more open finish, set white balance and exposure for the photo, apply Riviera, and then work upward in small steps.

1. Raise Exposure a third of a stop at a time, watching the face and the dress.
2. Click Light - Recover Highlights if the dress or the sky starts to lose texture.
3. Click Light - Open Shadows to lift the darker parts and leave the rest alone.
4. Click Light - Airy Frame for lighter corners and edges, which opens the frame around the couple.
5. On lawns and under trees, click Fix - Green Cast on People to take the green light off skin.
6. For a dress that needs more, click AI - Dress Clean White.

Each add-on is one click on top of the look, and every Lightroom slider still works afterwards, so you can go as bright as the frame allows.

Holding the look across a whole gallery

Bright edits drift more easily than dark ones. After an hour at the screen, bright starts to look normal and each scene creeps a little higher than the last. Pick one portrait in soft light as your anchor, edit it until the face and the dress are right, and keep it beside each new scene in Reference View. Match the brightness of the face first, then the white of the dress.

Two cameras make this harder, because each starts from its own profile and a pale edit shows the difference at once. With a NIPIK Base profile under each body, the typical difference between two cameras in daylight is under 1 ΔE, about the smallest step the eye can separate side by side, so your frames and your second shooter’s hold the same whites and the same skin. The reasons are in do Lightroom presets work the same on every camera brand.

Finish by looking at the whole gallery as thumbnails. A frame that glows brighter than its neighbors needs its Exposure brought down a little, and rarely anything else.