A Scenic World

So I realized that I’m always doing these tutorials where I spell out the white balance and the tone curve and the camera calibration, and then at the end I say, “But this isn’t actually how I do it!” Because it’s not. And the reason it’s not is because Lightroom is awesome.

If you don’t use Lightroom, you might just consider it another RAW converter, but it’s so much more. I should make it clear here that this blog post is not in the least an exhaustive explanation of all the things that Lightroom can do. You can organize your photos, tag your photos, add metadata to your photos, make slideshows with your photos, etc. etc. I’m also not trying to sell you on Lightrom. I merely want to show how the most basic element of post-processing in Lightroom – the preset – works.

So the workflow begins when I plug my card into the card reader, open Lightroom, and press “Import.” Today I’m going to be using a photo of a friend I took last summer; she’s a stunning beauty, and I realized then that this photo works with a multitude of editing styles.

So this is the original photo that we’ll be working with:

Once we open it, this is what we’re going to see. I went ahead and made high-tech arrows to show you what each part of the window looks like.

As you can see, you can see the original thumbnail at the bottom. Had we had more photos to work with, we would see numerous thumbnails there. The presets are in a little side panel (you can collapse this to give you more working room if you wish). You can see the effect the preset will have in the preview screen above the presets. And the large panel with the photo is the photo you’re working on.

So what are presets? They’re basically just a set of saved settings – the setting for white balance and curves and saturation levels and vignetting – that will be applied to the photo. And where do presets come from? Lightroom ships with a couple – sepia and black-and-white and “cold tone” and maybe a couple more. There are tons of places around the internet that let you download some for free (including this blog!). Some people make you pay. I make my own (which is another post entirely) and so can you. Basically, every time you have some settings you like, you can just click on “New Preset,” name it something funky like “Golden Glow,” and you have those settings forever.

When you scroll over the presets, you can immediately see in the preview screen how the photo will look with that preset applied. See?

What I like to do is to create virtual copies so that I can see how different versions will look. It’s easy: just right-click and choose “Create Virtual Copy.”

Now we’ll have two thumbnails to work on, although you can make a lot more than two if you wish (and you don’t have to make any):

Now, for those presets. As I said, you can scroll over the list and see how they’ll look if you apply them. In this example, I can use the preview to see how “Golden Glow” looks:

And then to apply it, just click on it. Yep! It’s that easy!

You’re not stuck with that preset either; you can still scroll over and see what the photo will look like with a different preset, in this case “High Contrast Sepia”:

In fact, you can make a bunch of virtual copies and see how they all look with different presets. You can even change the main panel to show you a side-by-side comparison of two different versions:

Now for the magic: all of that took about two minutes. So when you’ve finally decided which one you like, you just export and done. And if you realize the next day that you shouldn’t have had that bottle of wine while processing, just open Lightroom, click on your photo, and click this one little button provided:

So, in conclusion, I offer you a portrait in eight ways, completed in about two minutes:

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Lightroom Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.