What is the Minimal Black Look?
In this Adobe Lightroom tutorial, we’ll be creating a clean, minimalistic black and white style with some warm accents. This look has exploded in popularity in the past year, and is heavily inspired by a selective color editing.
What I enjoy about this minimal black style we’ll be creating, is that it works on both day and night images. It’s easily adapted to any type of photograph. Below are some example photos of what we’ll be creating.
Minimal Black Look Examples
As you can see in the photos above, just a pop of warmth really ads life to the black and white photos. There is a sublet fall-off to the warm tones, which looks more natural than just doing a selective color edit.
So let’s jump right into this Minimal Black Lightroom tutorial!
Minimal Black Lightroom Editing Tutorial
If it’s easier for you to follow along with text, keep reading. OR, watch the video above for how to achieve the Minimal Black look. If you’re looking to save some time, download my Minimal Black Lightroom Preset, here.
For starters, go ahead and tone your images how you normally would in the tone tab. Here’s a screenshot of my Tone tab. This will be a little different for each photo. You can check out the Before and After image is at the bottom of this post.
Pro Tip: Add a bit of Clarity [+20-40] for some contrast in your mid-tones. This will give your image a bit of punch and sharpness.
Next, we’re going to open up our HSL [Hue, Saturation, Luminance] tab. This is where we are going to create the soul of our minimal saturation look. In short, turn down all of your cool tones: Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple and Magenta. Magenta and Yellow are two of the sliders that I like to customize depending on how I want the final photo to look.
I prefer a softer warm accent instead of a harsh one, so I usually desaturate the warm tones a touch. When we add Clarity, we don’t want our colors to go overboard.
We’re almost done, just two quick steps. For some extra rich black tones, set your Profile to Adobe Vivid. If you want a softer feel, you can also try the Adobe Portrait profile.
Lastly, to fine tune exactly how much warmth and saturation you want in your photo, play with your Color Temperature Slider. A cooler temperature will result in less color, while a warmer temperature will add more warm tones to your shot.
Before and After Examples
So that’s it! You’ve created your very own Minimalistic Black photo in Lightroom. You can see the Before (Left) and After (Right) from my NYC Spidey shoot, below. You can also download my Minimal Black Lightroom Preset below!
