One-click photo editing usually lacks finesse and style—unless you do the one-click editing yourself. You can think of Lightroom presets as custom photo filters, turning an edit that originally took minutes (or more) into one that’s easy to apply to any image with a tap or click.
While purchasing Lightroom presets will start your library of presets, creating your own gives you complete control over the look of your photos and allows you to develop your own personal style. The process is surprisingly simple, but there are a few tricks to getting it right. Here’s how to create presets in Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC.
The key to creating successful presets
Lightroom presets apply the exact same settings to every photo. The trick to creating presets is to understand how these adjustments work and what should (and shouldn’t) be included in a preset.
Lightroom presets move each adjustment slider to exactly the same position, no matter where that slider starts. This is usually fine for sliders like highlights and shadows, where every unedited photo starts from scratch, but it won’t work so well for things like white balance and tint. A Lightroom preset will not add, say, 200 degrees to the temperature slider — it will move that slider to the exact temperature value set within the preset.
This becomes a problem when you apply a preset originally created for a gold watch photo to an image taken under fluorescent light. For this reason, most of the time, white balance settings should not be included in the presets.
Of course, white balance is the only thing that looks different in different lighting conditions. Everything from saturation to contrast can require varying amounts of fine-tuning depending on the situation. One solution to this is to create separate presets, perhaps one for outdoor images and one for indoor images, or one for harsh light and one for soft light, etc.
Presets aren’t Lightroom’s only tool for quick photo editing, either — the sync tool also applies the same settings to multiple images. However, both tools have very different uses. A preset is ideal for creating a style that you can apply to images in multiple collections. The sync tool can correct images taken in similar conditions. Where presets are ideal for styles, syncs can also be used to correct errors.
How to make Lightroom presets
1. Edit the image with the adjustments you want to save as presets.
Lightroom Classic CC Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Lightroom CC Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Lightroom presets start by simply adjusting a single image as you normally would.
Any adjustment is fair game, but keep in mind that the adjustment will be applied to every image you use the preset on. If you increase the exposure because the original was too dark, you will also lighten the exposure for images that were already correctly exposed. This will only lengthen the editing process as you will be going back and changing what is preset.
Fortunately, Lightroom gives you the option to turn off the adjustment from the presets.
2. Save the new setting.
Lightroom Classic CC Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Lightroom CC Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Lightroom will take those adjustments and turn them into presets for you in a few quick steps, but the process is slightly different between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC.
In Lightroom Classic, click the plus icon at the top of the presets tab on the left and select “create preset”. In the window that appears, give your preset a name and select the group where you want to save the new preset. Then use the checkmarks to indicate which adjustments you want to include in the preset. For example, you might want to undo the white balance adjustment if you’ve touched those sliders, or each image will get an identical white balance value regardless of the setting in the original image. Then click Create.
In Lightroom CC, go to the presets panel within the edit panel. Click the three-dot icon and select “create advance”. Choose a name and click Save. In CC, presets are automatically saved to the User Presets category.
3. Apply the preset.
Once you’ve created it, you can deploy it in just a few clicks. Highlight the image or images you want to apply changes to, then just select the preset you created in the presets panel.
If a preset doesn’t work as expected, you can easily edit it. Apply the preset to the image, then make the changes you want to make to the image itself. Then right click on the preset and select “update with current settings”. (The update process is the same in Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC.)
Do more with presets in Lightroom Classic
In Lightroom Classic, presets are good for more than just adjusting individual images. You can also apply predefined settings as you import each image — just look for the “apply on import” option.
Classic also allows you to create metadata presets to add the same copyright information or keywords to a photo — in the Library module below the metadata panel, select “edit preset” from the preset dropdown menu. You can also create export presets by going to File > Export and then, with the export settings you want to choose, click the add button on the left below the list of presets.
Lightroom Classic also lets you create new brush and mask presets. In the Brush Tool, Graduated Filter, or Radial Filter, make the adjustments you want to save to the slider. In the effect drop-down menu, select “save current settings as new preset”. The three tools share the same preset, so once you create a brush preset, it will also be available as a graduated filter and a radial filter. Preset brushes and masks are useful for common retouching tasks like whitening teeth and brightening eyes.
Lightroom’s presets save time and allow photographers to establish consistency in photo editing — and make them easy. There are some presets worth downloading, like the real movie inspired options, but creating your own presets allows you to quickly apply your own style to all your images.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn