Golden Hour In Autumn: Why It’s The Dream Season For Portrait Photogra

Many of us are clearing our schedules to make sure we can take full advantage of this beautiful season. It’s the perfect time for landscape, macro and portrait photographers to lean into the warmth that autumn leaves bring, with orange, red and yellow tones about to fill our frames and our social media feeds. If that wasn’t enough to create some stunning shots, adding golden hour into the mix will amplify the beauty even further.

For this article, I’m going to focus on portrait photography and portraiture retouching. I’ll guide you through what makes it so special and how to make the most of it. And if you’re a little nervous about trying, don’t stress: with autumn’s colors as your backdrop, your portraits will almost compose themselves.

Why Autumn Golden Hour is Unique

So, what is it that photographers enjoy so much about this time of year? The colour palette is a great place to start. The golden tones bring a sense of cosiness that can be pushed further by the outfits your subject is wearing. We are just coming out of summer, the temperatures are dropping, and it reminds us that we are entering the final stages of the year, the golden hour of the year if you will.

If you’re not familiar with golden hour, it’s that period of time when the sun is setting, and the light becomes warm and extremely flattering for your model’s skin tones and complexion. It’s another reason why I love shooting at this time, because the editing process becomes much more simple. Golden hour also boosts the warmth in the leaves and outfits, so everything in the frame works together beautifully.

What I particularly enjoy are the moods this time of year brings. Rustic and nostalgic themes can be woven naturally into your images, helped along by the unique textures that autumn offers through the leaves, trees and layered clothing. It’s easy to see why shooting in autumn golden hour is a joy for photographers. You get to enjoy the process, create striking portraits, and keep your post-processing work to a minimum. Speaking of editing, I’ll show you later in this article how to speed things up even more.

Learn more: The Magic Of Golden Hour Portraits And How To Make It The Best

Planning & Camera Tips for Golden Hour Portraits

Choosing the Right Location

Location is everything with autumn portraits. Head to the woods or park and look for beautiful locations filled with trees and falling leaves. We want to provide golden tones in both the backdrop and foreground to maximize the beauty of our shots.

Long paths work particularly well, as they provide the opportunity to draw the eye further in the frame beyond your model, with trees and leaves doing a great job on their own of drawing the eye making it effortless for you.

Find a nice leafy foreground as well, combined with the background we will achieve a golden frame around your model which will be sure to look fantastic.

Playing with Leaves and Light

This time of year also provides a unique opportunity for layering. Bring a friend along, and have them throw leaves over your model as they pose. Set your camera to burst-mode and shoot as those leaves start falling into your frame. Your frame will be busy yet everything will have its place, and you’ll be maximising that potential for beauty within your shots.

There’s even another technique to introduce more golden tones within your shot. Sunflares do a great job of adding more cosiness into your frame without being too obtrusive with more opportunity for layering. Sun flares can easily be added in post too if you weren’t quite able to achieve it during the shoot.

Styling and Working with the Model

As for outfit choices, there are two ways. The colours can lean into the warmth and cosiness or you can contrast them with cooler tones. One risk we do have is that we may lose our model in our frame if all the colours are too similar. We can place models in front of the darker aspects of your background like tree bark or the paths for further contrast if you’re worried about losing them in your frame.

As for poses, have fun with it! Have your model interact with fallen leaves. They can be throwing them into the air, reaching up to a branch or holding and posing with leaves. Showing that interaction between your model and autumn will help make the themes much stronger.

I really like to use the model’s gaze to draw attention to the trees above. Have them looking and reaching up, the eye will first be drawn to the model and then follow where the model is pointing attention. If you managed to find a long path, have your model walking or running down it, looking over their shoulder towards you.

Experimenting with Creative Ideas

Autumn shoots are also a great chance for you to make collages. Something I want to try is combine portrait shots with shots of the trees and macro shots of leaves up close, then compile them altogether for a series of autumnal photos.

Above all, I think the autumn season provides a fantastic opportunity to get super creative. If you’ve been in a rut recently or you’ve been getting a little bored with your summer shots, then autumn may just be that refreshment your work needs. Thankfully, the season isn’t as fleeting as spring, so you’ve time to get creative with project ideas and above all, have a lot of fun!

Editing Golden Hour Autumn Photos: Step by Step

Once you’ve finished your shoot, it’s time to get editing. I use Aperty for my portrait edits. With it being an outdoor portrait editor, it has all the tools you need to get the best out of your shots.

Step 1: Upload Your Photos to Aperty

Open Aperty and click on Import in the main menu. From here, you can drag and drop your image files or select a folder from your computer. Aperty supports RAW as well as JPEG, so you can upload everything straight from your memory card. After import, organize your files into albums or projects so you can keep each shoot tidy and easy to work with.

Step 2: Speed Up with AI & Batch Editing

Once your photos are in, it’s time to let the software do some of the heavy lifting. If you’re like me, autumn is such a busy time for shooting that you don’t want to either be spending more time editing than shooting, or get to the end of the season and realise you have a huge workload left over. That’s why Aperty is the best tool for the job, it gets your work done quickly and gets you back out shooting.

Step 3: Retouching Skin & Eyes

Next, move on to portrait retouching. With Aperty, you have a great deal of Retouch tools that can remove blemishes, smooth skin and maintain skin tones. As I’ve said, golden hour already does a great job of creating flattering and flawless results, so you won’t need to do too much here. I’ll usually head into the Face Skin menu, brighten the skin, smooth it a touch and use the shine removal tool.

There are also tools for the eyes which I love using — they brighten the whites and bring out the colours of the iris. The eyes are the most important feature of your model, so making them look more striking is a great way to capture attention quickly.

Step 4: Work on the Background with Auto Masking

After working on the subject, you can give some love to the background. Another stand-out feature in Aperty is automatic masking. You can select just the background of your image and work on that separately with one click. This is perfect for autumn portraits, because you can bring out the tones in the leaves and saturate them without affecting the model’s skin tones. Despite being portrait-dedicated, Aperty still provides all the essentials for photo editing. You can colour grade and use HSL sliders to fine-tune tones until they are just right.

Step 5: Add Creative Finishing Touches

Finally, wrap up your edit with some creative tools. Inside this menu, you will find vignette, which works great for those long path shots to help draw the eye deeper into the frame. The background tool is another favourite of mine, letting you adjust brightness, temperature and more without having to mess around with fiddly masks.

The Bottom Line

So there you have it, it’s easy to see why I, and many other photographers, are eagerly awaiting the turn of the season. Autumn brings with it a beautiful palette of colours, giving us cosy, nostalgic and rustic themes. We can get extra creative, having our model interact with the environment around them, perfect if you’ve started to feel like you’re entering a rut at the end of the summer. To top it all off, golden hour is another great way to amplify all of the beauty of fall, adding even more warmth to our shots.

Once you’ve finished with your shoots, head over to Aperty. You can get your edits done quickly with stunning results, and then get back out shooting. The last thing we need is a huge workload after the season ends, so using Aperty is a great way to stay on top of things.

Get ready for this exciting time of year, with your location, poses and themes locked in ahead of time, and enjoy your shoot. You’re guaranteed to have fun!