


When you’re working on your own, getting feedback from other photographers who are using exactly the same product can be invaluable and inspirational. You can share and get support from other photographers and educate yourself at the same time. Not only that, but some of the more expensive preset companies have a great community surrounding their products. The more expensive presets also bundle in Lightroom profiles and make use of Adobe Look up Tables (LUTs) for more finely-tuned colour correction and grading. As well as technical support for photographers, many of these have been tried and tested with a particular genre of photography in mind. You really get what you pay for when it comes to presets. So why on earth would you ever consider paying out $100s for a set?įreebies are great for getting your head around Lightroom presets work, but the outcomes aren’t that exciting and often quite heavy-handed. A quick Google of ‘free lightroom presets’ will also throw up a load more. Lightroom comes with a few presets as standard.

Some will radically change the overall appearance of a shot they might give your image a vintage effect, apply a radical colour cast or quickly transform your monochrome shots into black and white, or they can be really subtle and simply be a quick way to tweak your image curves or contrast. In Lightroom, you can fly through some options and check out the preset effects by glancing at the ‘Navigator’ preview and there’s very little lag. Most of the time, this means only have to concentrate on basic tweaks such as white balance or exposure and any spot adjustments, of course. With a lot of the groundwork done for you, a few quick adjustments can be made to suit your image and the overall look you’re going for. They’re a quick way of checking out variations on your image you might not have thought of yourself – or simply don’t have time to do. I like to think of them more as an ‘primer’. You are always going to have to do a BIT of work to make the images sing. Now, let me reiterate that a good Lightroom preset is never going to be a one-click solution to achieving a perfect image. Lightroom presets – what are they good for? Here’s where having some really great Lightroom presets in your armoury can really help you to achieve punchier shots and a stack of time. That ‘Auto Sync’ button will only get you so far… After all, your clients are patiently waiting and often very excited to see the end results. It’s do-able once you get into a rhythm and have your workflow perfected (I find setting myself much smaller chunks and scheduling mini breaks helps things feel a lot more achievable).īut when you have such a high volume of edits to get through on a week-by-week basis, the notion of individually working through each image from scratch, perfecting the white balance and exposure and fine-tuning curves and levels becomes massively unrealistic. It’s not unusual to have to edit 1,000+ images over the course of a week, maybe more if you’re shooting back-to-back sessions. As well as eating into precious profits, there’s something that’s never felt quite right about completely letting go of the control of how my final images will look, and how they’re presented to my clients. But, for me, it’s never felt appropriate. Sure, there are plenty of places offering post-production services and if you’re more interesting shooting and spending time in the field with your clients there’s no shame in this. No matter how many shortcuts are memorised, or workflow systems tweaked it always feels like the image-editing process is never fast enough. The season always starts with great intentions to keep on top of the workload, but it’s not very long before my left eye starts gets the overtired floating blur and RSI sets in.
#Adobe lightroom classic presets professional
Working as a professional wedding photographer the “ wediting” churn throughout mid to late summer can get really overwhelming. But something’s not right and it just doesn’t have the punch you pictured when you were shooting it. Technically, your photo is sound, the exposure is spot on, the composition is solid and you’ve worked hard to get the lighting just right.

Best Adobe Lightroom presets for photographers Emma Davenport rounds up some of the best options available for photographers tackling their post-processing. A great Lightroom Preset not only gives an image a new lease of life and can raise its quality to the next level, but it can also drastically speed up your workflow.
