How To Create A Lomo Effect In Lightroom

On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn demonstrates how to create the look of an old Lomo camera in Lightroom.

Everything that you are going to do will be done in the develop tab. The first steps will be to use both graduated & radial filters. The basic idea here is to make the corners darker, we will also add color to these filters (you can add any color you want – blue or green depending on your photo). Keep in mind that you can make more than one filter.

A lot of the work in creating a Lomo effect is making it imperfect (we are talking about an effect that replicated an old basically low quality image).

Another thing that you can add is split toning which will add more color to the image as a whole (again – which color exactly depends on your image and what you are going for).

If you really want to go with the retro is adding grain and distortion (the last one seems a bit too much “retro” for us – but this is up to you) and finally you can reduce clarity a bit especially from the edges.

To us this whole thing looks a bit counter intuitive (basically exactly the exact opposite to what we normally aim for in processing an image but processing is an art of its own so more or less anything goes). In the final stage Nace shows how to create this as a preset in Lightroom.

You can check out more useful Lightroom guides and tips on our LensVid Lightroom section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.