Lightroom Presets

stapo49 · Nov 6, 2019

I am just wondering if anyone uses or used Lightroom presets? Are they useful? A waste of money?

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Amy30 · Nov 7, 2019

Hi, I have used them and they are very useful. Installation of presets in Lightroom used to be annoying you’d have to download them, find your presets folder, drag them over , it was a rigmarole that discouraged many from downloading and using presets in the first place.
you can sync it with your mobile app too.

stapo49 · Nov 7, 2019

Amy30 said:
Hi, I have used them and they are very useful. Installation of presets in Lightroom used to be annoying you’d have to download them, find your presets folder, drag them over , it was a rigmarole that discouraged many from downloading and using presets in the first place.
you can sync it with your mobile app too.

Do you recommend any or they all much the same? I am constantly seeing ads from different people spruking their presets.

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smoke665 · Nov 7, 2019

I have a large collection of presets free, purchased and my own. Occasionally I use them, mostly the ones I've saved of specific functions. I've found the AI ability of the "Auto" button a good first stop. It gets it close enough that I can dial in the final adjustments quickly. For finishing I rely heavily on a large collection of Profiles. Profiles can be added before, during or after slider adjustments because they have no effect on the sliders, plus the opacity adjustment lets you really dial in the effect, much like a layer in Ps.

stapo49 · Nov 7, 2019

smoke665 said:
I have a large collection of presets free, purchased and my own. Occasionally I use them, mostly the ones I've saved of specific functions. I've found the AI ability of the "Auto" button a good first stop. It gets it close enough that I can dial in the final adjustments quickly. For finishing I rely heavily on a large collection of Profiles. Profiles can be added before, during or after slider adjustments because they have no effect on the sliders, plus the opacity adjustment lets you really dial in the effect, much like a layer in Ps.

Interesting, thanks. As I mentioned earlier there are a lot of people spruking their presets for sale online. Can you recommend one or two options?

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Braineack · Nov 7, 2019

I like the VSCO film ones. They have camera profiles as well as curves that accompany the adjustments.

stapo49 · Nov 7, 2019

Braineack said:
I like the VSCO film ones. They have camera profiles as well as curves that accompany the adjustments.

Thanks. I will check them out.

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smoke665 · Nov 7, 2019

stapo49 said:
smoke665 said:

I have a large collection of presets free, purchased and my own. Occasionally I use them, mostly the ones I've saved of specific functions. I've found the AI ability of the "Auto" button a good first stop. It gets it close enough that I can dial in the final adjustments quickly. For finishing I rely heavily on a large collection of Profiles. Profiles can be added before, during or after slider adjustments because they have no effect on the sliders, plus the opacity adjustment lets you really dial in the effect, much like a layer in Ps.

Click to expand...

Interesting, thanks. As I mentioned earlier there are a lot of people spruking their presets for sale online. Can you recommend one or two options?

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Some of the best presets you'll find are the ones you save because they refle t your style. That said there are a ton of free ones out there that let you try before you buy. Once you download and try a few, make note of the develop module settings, and play with making your own. For purchase VSCO as mentioned above is good, as is Portraits Presets for Lightroom and Photoshop ACR and Lightroom Profiles | Matt Kloskowski for profiles. ON1 has some free profiles for Lr also. The bad thing about presets is they are going to look different on every image. Profiles have the advantage of letting you adjust the opacity for effect.

Derrel · Nov 7, 2019

I got a bunch of free presets from Matt k a few years ago, and I am still using them. I like presets, and you can adjust their effect, and can save and rename them, allowing you to arrive at custom presets that reflect the way you see things.

I think that presets are really useful, and can tremendously speed up your editing. Fairly famous fashion photographer Lindsay Adler has an excellent YouTube tutorial on what presets are, and how to save and rename them.

I have found that using two or three presets to edit one picture can lead to some truly interesting looks. I think sometimes a good idea is to use a preset in color , and then to convert to black-and-white, which can lead to some very cool looking black and white images. One of my favorite presets was one called Ultimate Fighter and I used to really like to convert color images with the ultimate fighter preset and then to adjust the image to be a black and white

Derrel · Nov 7, 2019

The Matt K video that smoke665 linked us to is well worth the watch! The new implementation of profiles and color lookup tables is remarkable. Finally after 12 long years, Lightroom has been revolutionized.

smoke665 · Nov 8, 2019

Derrel said:
The Matt K video that smoke665 linked us to is well worth the watch! The new implementation of profiles and color lookup tables is remarkable. Finally after 12 long years, Lightroom has been revolutionized.

Profiles in Lr have been around since last year, but it seems many have been slow to use them. Once they do they find out what an amazing feature it is. It's fairly easy to make your own custom LUT's for Ps or Profiles for Lr.

FYI: ON1 has a plugin for Lr that I really want to try. Right now it's free. , ON1 Effects 2019 – ON1 howeve, for some reason I haven't been able to get the entire file to download without crapping out. It's a fairly large file and I suspect there's a lot of traffic on the server.

stk · Nov 8, 2019

I don't see the point unless it's important that all your images have a similar look. But then you should probably make your own preset.

My experience is only from using my own and/or free presets. Maybe the expensive ones are betters, but I struggle to see how.

smoke665 · Nov 8, 2019

stk said:
I don't see the point unless it's important that all your images have a similar look. But then you should probably make your own preset.

My experience is only from using my own and free presets. Maybe the expensive ones are betters, but I struggle to see how.

For me presets serve two functions. They automate a standardized set of steps that are consistent across a set of images, or they provide a starting point for inspiration. I have yet to find any preset free or paid that created the same look on every image, adjustments are required. Profiles on the other hand, do offer some degree of standardization across multiple images, especially when utilizing the opacity slider

stk · Nov 8, 2019

smoke665 said:
For me presets serve two functions. They automate a standardized set of steps that are consistent across a set of images, or they provide a starting point for inspiration. I have yet to find any preset free or paid that created the same look on every image, adjustments are required. Profiles on the other hand, do offer some degree of standardization across multiple images, especially when utilizing the opacity slider

English is not my first language, but for me there's a difference between "similar" and "same". Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway I do belive that you can get a very similar look to your images by using a preset. I agree, you'd still need to adjust a lot of the parameters (temperature, contrast, exposure, black and white points, noise reduction, sharpening and so on), but you could create a signature look by making a preset with your own mix of colors, some vignette, curves adjustments and so on that would look quite good over a large set of photos.

But again, It's not for me.

Derrel · Nov 8, 2019

I just looked at a bunch of portrait type presets for $14-- really quite affordable in my opinion. For the price of roughly 4 fancy coffee drinks you get the ability to make your pictures look quite nice. I see nothing wrong with buying a bunch of presets dot-dot-dot you can easily make changes to the presets and rename and save them and use them for a long time.

It seems that some people who don't use presets do not understand that you can modify many different parameters within the preset. As Matt K mentioned in his video, oftentimes a particular preset looks good on a light or a medium or a dark file, and as such he used to often have three different presets, but now with the profiles addition it is possible to use one preset and to lessen or increase the amount.