Presets that Actually Work

I love Lightroom - it's a great program that makes managing and processing RAW photos a breeze. Until yesterday, I really didn't have much use for the 'develop module' presets that come packed into the software. After exploring them, I fell in love with the Adobe-generated ones and went on to alter 'em to create my own.

The first photo's preset is 'direct positive'. It raises the exposure and the recovery, boosts blacks, increases the s-shape of the tone curve, and boosts some saturation. For all of that, the effect is actually rather subtle - but really, really nice.

This preset is 'aged photo'. You'd think that Lightroom is doing some split-toning, but it isn't. It's altering the camera calibration of the red, green, and blue channels, as well as decreasing the saturation of the blue channel.

The reason I titled this blog post 'Presets that Actually Work' is because, well, just that - they do. When I think 'preset', I typically think things like - 'lame, cheesy, canned, uh…LAME'. It appears that the smart folks over at Adobe were thinking about photographers when they developed these presets, because they aren't any of those things - they're actually pretty great tools.