How to Edit Photos to Give Them a Dark & Moody Look

Bright and colorful photos are nice but sometimes you want your images to have added drama and a touch mystery. To do that, you can give them a dark and moody look during post-processing if you didn’t capture them that way in camera.

In the below tutorial, Daniel Inskeep of Mango Street shows you how to easily edit dark and moody photos. Even better, he throws in a free “Dark + Moody” preset here to create the look even more quickly.

“Usually, moody photos have less detail in the shadows and usually less saturation, at least with certain colors,” Inskeep says. “Of course, there’s no one set way to edit photos but usually the way we go about editing is to create looks that will work across a wide range of photos.”

Watch below as he walks you through a “dark and moody edit” of a photo of a person in front of a waterfall that he wanted to add some drama to.

“Here we have a six-second exposure in front of a very secret location that you’ve definitely never seen before,” Inskeep explains. “First, we see the image is a bit underexposed, which isn’t a big deal. With our Canon 35mm lens we find that turning on profile corrections always brightens up things a lot.”

Check out the entire process below and then go visit and subscribe to Mango Street’s channel to get all their quality photography content.

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