How to Create Sunset Color & Light in Lightroom Desktop

How to Create Sunset Color and Light in Lightroom Desktop

Warm, glowing sunset light rarely comes straight out of the camera — it’s usually built afterward with a combination of global color grading and a couple of carefully placed radial masks that mimic where the actual light is coming from. This tutorial covers both halves of that process in Lightroom Desktop.

Warming Up the Base Image with Temperature and Tint

Starting in the Edit panel, nudging Temperature warmer and adjusting Tint slightly toward green (away from magenta) lays the groundwork for a sunset feel before any more targeted adjustments come in.

Non-Destructive Editing at Any Time

None of these adjustments need to be perfect on the first pass — every slider here stays fully editable, so early decisions can always be revisited once the rest of the edit takes shape.

Using Color Grading Across Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights

The Color Grading panel offers three separate color wheels — Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights — each controlled by clicking and dragging the small slider out from center in the direction of the desired color, which is how a genuinely graded, cinematic look gets built one tonal range at a time.

Adjusting Hue and Saturation Within an Already-Set Color

Once a color is placed, dragging the outer ring rotates its hue, and dragging the inner circle from center outward increases or decreases its saturation — a slider at the bottom of each wheel also controls brightness for that tonal range, all independently adjustable after the initial color choice.

Darkening and Warming the Highlights for a Sunset Glow

For a moody sunset look, the Highlights wheel gets pulled toward orange while also being dragged darker, taming what would otherwise be blown-out, overly bright sky detail into something that reads as warm, late-day light instead.

Fine-Tuning Midtones to Remove an Unwanted Color Cast

If the midtones pick up too much magenta from the overall warming pass, returning to the Midtones color wheel and pulling some of that magenta back out keeps skin tones and other midtone detail from looking artificially pink.

Creating a Sun Glow with a Radial Gradient Mask

Global color grading affects the entire photo, but a believable sun glow needs to be localized. In the Masking panel (M), a Radial Gradient mask dragged out over one area of the frame creates a contained region where Exposure, brightened Shadows, and a warmer Temperature combine to suggest sunlight breaking through.

Adding Haze and Softness with Clarity and Dehaze

Lowering Clarity slightly softens the masked area, and lowering Dehaze adds a touch of atmospheric haze — together suggesting dust or moisture catching the light, which sells the sun-glow effect much more convincingly than sharp, clear detail would.

Adjusting a Radial Mask’s Size and Feathering

Dragging the mask’s corner handle resizes the radial gradient, and raising Feather (either with its own slider or by dragging the inner control ring) softens the mask’s edge until the transition between affected and unaffected areas becomes smooth and unnoticeable rather than an obvious hard-edged circle.

Changing the Mask Overlay Color for Easier Viewing

The colored overlay shown while editing a mask (red by default; the green in the video is a color chosen under Show Overlay) can be changed to whichever color is easiest to see clearly against a given photo, and toggled off entirely once the mask’s shape and position are already set.

Layering a Second Radial Mask for the Sun’s Center

A second, smaller Radial Gradient mask placed at the presumed center of the sun — pushed even warmer in Temperature and brighter in Exposure and Shadows than the first mask — adds a concentrated hot spot that reads as the actual light source, layered on top of the broader glow from the first mask.

Comparing Before and After at Any Point in the Edit

The slash key (just above Enter/Return) toggles a full before-and-after view of every adjustment made so far, and the small eye icon next to any individual mask in the Masks panel shows a before-and-after for just that one mask — both useful for judging whether an effect has gone far enough, or too far.

Why Global Grading Plus Local Masks Works

Color Grading’s three-wheel shadows/midtones/highlights split makes it possible to push a cohesive warm tone across the whole image without flattening it into one single color, while radial masks add the one thing global adjustments can’t: a believable, localized light source. Layering a broad glow mask with a smaller, brighter mask for the sun’s actual center is what gives the light a sense of falloff and direction, rather than an even wash of warm color across the entire frame.

Final Thoughts

Convincing sunset color comes from working at two different scales: a global color grade across shadows, midtones, and highlights to set the overall mood, and one or more radial masks to place a believable glow exactly where the light source should be. Every part of it stays editable, and the same tools are available in Lightroom on mobile and tablet too.

Quick Reference: Keys, Menus and Settings

• Warm the baseEdit panel > Color: Temp warmer, Tint a little left toward green
• Grade the tonesColor Grading: Shadows reddish orange and brighter; Highlights orange, slider pulled darker; Midtones to remove magenta
• Before and after/ (the slash key, above Return/Enter)
• Sun glowM for Masking > Radial Gradient; Exposure, Shadows and Temp up; Clarity and Dehaze down
• Soften the maskFeather slider at the top of the mask panel or the inner circles; drag the edge circle to resize
• Sun’s centerCreate New Mask > Radial Gradient, smaller; Temp, Shadows and Exposure up
• Compare the masksClick the eyeball in the Masks panel

Same keys on Mac and Windows. No AI, no generative credits.