Earthy Brown Tones: My New Lightroom Preset Pack
Why I Built Earthy Brown Tones
I’ve been editing photographs for 32 years, and in that time I’ve developed a pretty specific idea of what I want color to feel like. Warm. Grounded. A little filmic. The kind of image that looks like a memory instead of a screenshot.
For years I got there the long way, pulling down highlights, warming shadows, desaturating the greens just enough that a New Orleans summer doesn’t scream at you. It worked, but it was slow, and I was doing the same moves over and over on every shoot.
So I finally sat down and built the look into a preset pack. That’s what Earthy Brown Tones is: the color grade I actually use, packaged so it takes one click instead of twenty.
What the Presets Actually Do
The heart of this pack is how it handles greens and skin at the same time. Louisiana has aggressively green oak canopies, Spanish moss, elephant ears, ferns, and untouched green that tends to go neon and pull a sickly cast into skin tones.
Earthy Brown Tones walks the greens toward a deeper, more muted forest color and lets warm browns and creams carry the image. Skin stays natural. Shadows get a little density instead of turning gray and flat. Highlights roll off softly rather than clipping.
It’s not a filter that stamps a mood on top of your photo. It’s a starting point that respects what you actually shot.
See It For Yourself
The before and after images in the gallery below are straight out of real work in New Orleans.
Look at what happens to the foliage in the garden bench frames. The “before” is accurate, but it’s busy and your eye bounces around the greens. The “after” settles everything down and puts the couple where they belong, at the center of the picture.
The warehouse lobby is my favorite example of the pack working on something that isn’t a portrait. Old brick, heart pine, and warm bulbs all deepen without the whole frame going muddy.
How I Use Them in My Own Work
I don’t treat presets as a finish line. On a real job I’ll apply one from the pack, then spend maybe thirty seconds adjusting exposure and white balance for that specific frame. The preset does the heavy structural work of the grade; I handle the fine tuning.
That’s the honest way to use any preset, and it’s why consistency matters so much in wedding work and commercial shoots alike. When a client gets 600 images back, those images need to look like they belong to each other. A good preset pack is really a consistency tool.
They’re built for Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC, and Adobe Camera Raw, and they work on both raw files and JPEGs — though you’ll get the most latitude out of raw.
Get the Pack
If the look in these before and after images is in the direction you’ve been chasing in your own editing, the Earthy Brown Tones pack is available in my shop as an instant download.
Call or text 504-957-8412 to commission GK
