To Preset or Not To Preset.

Lightroom presets have opened up a whole new world of one click creative possibilities.  Love them or hate them they are here to stay.

It has been pouring with rain for the last three days so in order to kill some time I had a look through some Lightroom presets.  A preset is a series of adjustments that has been saved and which you can then apply to your images with a single click.  The amount of presets on the internet is truly staggering and you can find one for pretty much anything.  Weddings.  Landscapes.  Nature.  Portraits.  I took a few minutes and applied various single click presets to one of my images.  This is the image I used.

The image above is directly from camera.  No adjustments whatsoever.  From here I applied a number of single click presets with quite a few interesting results.

Vibrance

Quite a nice one to use as it just gives your image that little bit of color-punch.

Dark Vignette

A single click gives you a dark vignette around the image which draws your attention to the focal area.

Only Orange

This preset removes all the colors, except shades of orange from the image for an interesting result.

Antique

Called antique and gives an… interesting (?) result.  Not my favorite type of images but still – made with a single click.

Antique

Another version of the antique look.   Even with all the digital improvements we have seen the ‘antique’ look keeps on popping up.

Sepia

A single click sepia image with a dark vignette.

With thousands and thousands of Lightroom presets floating around on the internet anybody can now create ‘artistic’ images.  You don’t even have to understand the difference between hue and vibrance to be able to use them.  Yes, presets can make for interesting images and give you a creative boost to you digital darkroom but I still believe you need to play around with your images and do it yourself.

I have personally never used a preset to process an image as I like to have control over every little adjustment.  After looking around on the net I might just change my mind as there are a lot of very subtle presets available which, especially when you are processing a large number of images, will make things a whole lot easier.  If you are keen to download and play with Lightroom presets here are a few links that will get you started.

• WOW Presets
• Preset Heaven
• ProphotoShow
• Lightroom Presets

These links will get you started with a lot of presets.  Use them.  Try them.  But also make sure you try and play with the sliders in Lightroom, and Photoshop, to understand what they do and what they mean.  To truly let you images come alive and realize your original vision you will more than likely have better results if you take full control of the digital darkroom rather than apply a single click preset, however cool they might be.

Hey, there is a time and a place for everything.  Whether you use presets or not, remember that our craft is still based on creating images.  Use your camera, see the light and photograph what excites you.  And then decide how you want to process your images.

If you have any thoughts or links you would like to share, I look forward to hearing from you.

Gerry