Black and White Lightroom Presets
Hey there!
I am an avid user of Adobe Lightroom and use almost exclusively it to process all of my images, but something I just never got around to learning was how to create and use my own presets.
There are a number of different types of presets, such as metadata presets, export presets and print presets, but today I want to mention develop presets and more specifically to share some that I have created for making black and white photos. Up until recently my opinion of presets was along the lines of “why would I want to use identical settings when so few photo’s are the same?”
That was until I caught this video on world-renowned Lightroom good-guy Matt Kloskowski’s web site Lightroom Killer Tips – http://lightroomkillertips.com/2010/video-anatomy-of-a-preset/
In this video Matt talks about how you can be selective in which settings you actually save as a preset and how they are most powerful when used only as a baseline for continued editing. For example, most photo’s will require different exposure adjustments from each other, but you still might want to apply the same saturation or curve to create a particular look to them (be warned I’m paraphrasing here!)
So I have been working on some basic presets which can be used in conjunction with each other to build up an effect, from which you can then apply further unique settings to once the overall look and feel of the image has been established.
There are 4 presets in this Zip file which I would love you to download and try out for yourself… There is a baseline black and white conversion preset used best on portraits, which concentrates on lightening skin tones and adding a bit of overall contrast, then there are three Split Toning presets which can be applied after the base B&W preset and all give a slightly different feel to a portrait.
SteveArnoldPhoto- Tinted B&W presets <– download link
And here is a sample of what these look like when applied to a photo:
The original image with no presets applied
Now with the baseline Black and White preset applied
Black and White preset with the Warm preset applied on top
Now B&W plus my green/pink split tone preset
Finally, B&W plus my blue/yellow split toned preset
So now you know what i’ve been up to this past few days – please feel free to download and use my presets as they are, or play around with them and if you are like I was a few days ago, just use them to help understand what exactly is involved in creating your own. I really would reccommend you hit that link earlier in the post to the lightroom killer tips video about the anatomy of a preset as it was enough for me to start really thinking about how presets can become a useful part of my workflow.
Cheers!
