 Today I'm going to show you how to give your photos that cool faded look. What's up nerds? Today I want to show you how to get that really cool faded look. Now I know all of you have seen this look before. It's all over Instagram. It's all over Flickr and 500 pixels and it's something that a lot of photographers use in their photography nowadays. And I've been asked a couple of times if I could show some people how to do that. And so I want to take a moment today to show you a few ways or a few things to consider when giving your photos that faded look inside of Lightroom. So we're going to jump in here and play around with the picture real quick. Now before I go ahead and do that, here's the deal. This is a look that's probably not for everybody. Everyone has different tastes and different styles and I totally get that. I also like to think of photography as recipes. It's like cooking. You might like lasagna and other people might not like lasagna. And so it's really a matter of taste. The same way it is for eating food. It's the same way for creativity. And so all this is a recipe and it's up to you to decide what you want your recipe to be and what type of taste do you want your photograph to have. So this is a little subjective. It's going to work for some people and it's not going to work for some people. So just kind of keep that in mind. But I just want to show you how to do it. And then you can decide how much or how little of this effect, even if at all you want to use it in your photography. So let's jump into the develop module and show you a couple of things. So the first thing, probably the easiest thing to do is to head into the basic panel. Typically, if you reduce contrast moving your slider to the left or into to the negative as you reduce the contrast down, you'll actually give the photo a much softer look. So reducing contrast is one way that you can give your photo a faded look. Another way that you could think about giving your image this faded look is to reduce the blacks. If we head on over to the black slider and we move our slider to the negative to the left, the blacks are going to get darker. So unlike contrast, we want to move it in the opposite direction. We want to move our blacks to the plus, making them brighter, which is moving them to the right. And sometimes by moving the blacks up, you'll start to get a softer look. So what I would do is in conjunction with moving my blacks up, I would then go in and then move my contrast down. And another thing that you could do is even reduce the clarity just a little bit. That will also soften the picture. Now you want to be really careful with clarity because clarity will actually make the picture look muddy and yucky if you go too far with it. So just a little bit, but between these three sliders alone, contrast, blacks and clarity, we go from this as our before image to this as our after image. So when you kind of mix these three together, you start to get that faded look. I'm going to go ahead and reset this back to the beginning and I'm going to show you another way. This is probably the more common way that people will give their photos the faded look. And it's by using the tone curve adjustment. So if we go under our tone curve, I've not talked a lot about the tone curve in this channel yet, but I plan to do some tutorials on the tone curve because I think it's a really powerful and underutilized tool for a lot of beginners. And so if you just kind of understand some basics and play around with it a little bit, you can get some really fun looks. This is just another example of that. So now all you're going to do for the faded look is on this tone curve, we have this diagonal line going at a 45 degree angle. And what you want to do is try and click, not click, but drag the lower left bottom point or the corner of this line. And you just want to drag it up. Now you can see that faded look happening here, but I want to just tell you something that happens to a lot of people. It happens to me all the time with this curve and it drives you crazy is sometimes you'll try and grab that point and slide it up like I'm doing here to give you that faded look and it won't work. It'll sort of get stuck and instead it'll do some like weird thing like this where the curve is actually bending. So a little trick that I have found to make it easier for you to actually fade this the way you want is grab the point and drag it to the right and then start to move it up. So don't try and just drag the point from corner straight up because sometimes it'll give you some problems. If it works for you, fantastic. If it doesn't pull it to the right and then start to drag it up. You'll get that faded look you want and then you can drag the pen back over to the left hand side. And so now I can easily move this line up and down until I get just the right faded look that I want. Now before you go as a quick little bonus, I'm going to give you guys two free presets one for color faded and one for black and white faded. If I'm going to leave a link in the description below or you can look at the card right here in the top, either one will send you to where these free presets are. You can download them, load them into your catalog and play with them. But if I show you what they look like and just go on to my presets and go over to these faded free ones. I've got one that works really well. If you have people in your picture like I do here, if I go ahead and click on it, it gives you this really nice faded look. Or you can go with the black and white faded, which will give this a really cool kind of vintage vibe. Now if you are someone who is a Patreon supporter, we've also loaded some additional faded presets on our Patreon page. Some of them or two in particular that I really like is this cool faded, which if you have a photo that's really warm and you want it to look a little bit colder or a little bit bluer, this one's really cool. And then we also have a warmer, browner faded look for you as well. But there's four or five other presets in this pack. I think there's a total of six here on our Patreon page and then two free ones that I'm just going to give you if you head on over to this link here. So enjoy those, play with them. It's also important to know the way presets will look good on some photos but not on others. So if you try these presets on one photo and it doesn't look good, it's not the preset. It's the photo. Try a different photo and see if that preset looks better on that image. Eventually as you scroll through different images, you'll find the one where this preset is just magic on it. So don't give up on them. They're really cool. As you can see here, I love them. I use them all the time, but it's got to be the right photo. And that's not true of just my presets. That's true of anyone's presets out there on the market. So hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial, found it helpful or useful or fun. And hopefully you'll download these free presets and use them on your pictures. Use the hashtag PNFL on your Instagram account if you're using these presets. I'd love to see what you guys are coming up with. It's always fun to check out other artists' work and see what you guys are doing. That's part of the community that we're trying to build here. So that's all I've got for you today. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great weekend, everybody.