Why Raising the Blacks Can Make a Lightroom Sunset Glow

Sunset photos often come out of the camera with crushed shadows and a sky that looks cooler than the moment felt. Lightroom can fix both, and how you lift the dark areas decides whether the scene ends up soft and glowing or just muddy.

Most sunset edits start by adding contrast. Christian Möhrle goes the other way and opens up a dark scene with a water reflection until almost nothing in it reads as black. First, he clears an odd structure at the bottom of the frame using the Remove tool set to Generative AI, which takes a single brushstroke. He then switches the profile from Adobe Color to Adobe Standard. That small change lowers the starting contrast and makes everything after it easier. Shadows and blacks come up a lot, exposure comes down to protect the brightest part of the sky, and the histogram ends up with no clipping at either end. Only after that does he add back some highlights and contrast for punch.

Color comes next. The temperature slider does most of the work, pushing the whole frame toward warm gold. Texture goes up to keep fine detail, while clarity and dehaze go down to soften the overall look. The split is useful to copy: texture handles small detail and clarity handles midtone contrast, so you can soften the mood without the image going mushy. For the blue at the top of the sky, Möhrle uses a color range mask, subtracts a linear gradient so only the upper sky is affected, and pulls the exposure down slightly.

The glow is where the edit gets interesting. Lightroom's sky mask usually isn't that precise, Möhrle says, but here its habit of bleeding into the foreground is exactly what he wants. He feathers the mask so the selection spills further into the landscape and subtracts a gradient to keep the top of the sky untouched. Then he raises the blacks instead of the exposure, which brightens the darker areas near the light without blowing out the sun. A temperature bump to around 40, plus lower clarity and dehaze, finishes the bloom. The reflection gets its own version of this through a flipping trick in the Photo menu, and once the photo is flipped back, he warns against updating the AI masks, since all that flipping confuses Lightroom and an update would wreck the selections.

Diffusion filters such as the Tiffen Black Pro-Mist create a similar effect at the lens. They scatter a little light from bright areas into nearby shadows, lifting the darkest tones around a light source while leaving the highlights mostly intact. Raising blacks inside a feathered mask copies that behavior in software. Raising exposure would brighten the sun along with everything else and push it toward clipping. Once you think of bloom as lifted shadows around a light source, you can build it in other scenes: a streetlight at dusk, a window in a dark interior, or a backlit subject in a portrait. A radial gradient centered on the source works well when the light is small. Doing this in the edit also means you can decide on the effect later. A filter commits you to it at capture, and you can't remove it afterward.

The color grade stays restrained. Highlights and midtones both get a warm orange hue, with more saturation in the highlights and a luminance lift to brighten them without clipping. The shadows get no color at all. Möhrle only lowers their luminance to bring back a little depth. He also uses the global wheel for one more warm, slightly brighter pass. Noise reduction comes last. Lightroom's Denoise defaults to 50, which is far too strong for this file. Möhrle drops it to 15, which cleans up the darker areas without leaving strange patterns.

Möhrle's vegetation mask and more are in the video above.