Photography: Adobe Lightroom 3: Presets

Adobe Lightroom is awesome software, but the built in presets are a bit uninspired. Mainly designed for JPG work-flow, they don't use the controls available enough to really pull the best out of RAW images from DSLRs and high end digital compacts. A RAW image file has a lot more dynamic range to play with; so much so, they can often look a little flat to begin with, but by applying a few tweaks and touches you can make average images look a little more special and special ones really pop out of the screen or page.

I often find myself looking at images which require similar settings to that which I've used before. So I created presets from the settings on images I liked. By selecting the right settings to save I found myself with presets I could apply to any image I'd already tweaked and get close to the result I was looking for. 

The two in the zip file, downloadable from below, are the two that I use as a starting point for most pictures.

- One is a Black and White process with a customised colour curve that I find works very well on people portraits. Some images need a bit of extra exposure dialled in after this has been applied, but like I've said these are a great starting point for an image.

- The other is a colour cross process, which I have dubbed  "Film" Look. It gives images a gold/orange highlight combined with a teal shadow. It also dials in a saturation cut and a black level boost, for a high contrast image. Some images need that Black boost to be pulled back down and the saturation boosted to compensate.

It's worth mentioning that I use a Sony a300, with Minolta, Sony and Tamron glass. Any other system might get different results.

Download (from SkyDrive)

Disclaimer: I provide any files for you to download in the knowledge that they contain no viruses or the like. By downloading and using this file you accept that I am not responsible for any harm that may come to you or your computer as a direct result of doing so.