Lightroom Presets

I’m slowly making available some sets of Lightroom presets. These are currently known to work with LR3. Your mileage may vary with other versions. As with anything posted on this site, your comments are welcome!

Download the Dryrose Lightroom Presets now!

The organization of these presets is something that I’ve seen a few other people do, so that is certainly not original. I like to work that way, though, so there it is.

Installation of Presets

  1. Download the presets
  2. Unzip the archive (double-click should do it on Windows or Mac)
  3. Open Lightroom
  4. Go to the Develop module
  5. In the preset panel, create five new folders:
    • 1 – B&W
    • 2 – Color
    • 3 – Vignettes
    • 4 – Sharpening and Noise
    • 99 – Omnibus
  6. Right-click on B&W and select “import”
  7. Navigate to where you unzipped the archive and find the first preset in the “B&W” directory
  8. Import the lrtemplate file
  9. Repeat for every preset in B&W
  10. Right-click on Color and select “import”
  11. Repeat steps 7-9 for everything in “Color”
  12. Do the same for Vignettes and Sharpening and Noise

Note: There is a directory called “Omnibus,” but there are no presets located there (yet). I use this for some of the default Lightroom presets that I use a lot (specifically, “Direct Positive” and one of the split-toning presets) that are essentially one-click looks. I didn’t want to distribute those again, as I couldn’t find a whole lot of information about the legality of redistributing Adobe-provided presets. I hope to add some more presets into this category that are my own, and will then include them here.

Using the Presets

These presets were designed to function mostly as building-blocks during the development process. For instance, one might use “B&W AutoMix” to convert to black-and-white with the standard Lightroom automatic mix, then use “Add Punchy Curve” to yield more dramatic contrast, then Add Light Grain to get some photorealistic grain. Then, maybe use Medium Vignette under the “Vignettes” folder to burn the edges.

You will notice that there are a few presets that say something like, “No Toning.” These are used to zero-out split toning, which one might do a bit while experimenting with different treatments of a photograph.

Under the “Color” folder, there are some toning presets that are typically used with the “Mute Color” preset. Mute Color drops the saturation a bit and adds a little bit of contrast. Then, the “Green-Yellow” or “Violet-Sepia” presets might be used to tone the image a bit. You might wonder why these presets don’t also modify the contrast by themselves. The reason for that is because I sometimes use “Mute Color” by itself as a base for other modifications, and I chose to keep it and use it as a building block for other treatments.

I plan to add more, of course, but I do a lot with just these. If I start working with something that needs much more than this, I’ll typically bring the photo into Photoshop anyway.

I hope that this is at least a little bit useful to you. I’ve been working on organizing my presets into this sort of categorization for a while. It helps me when I’m developing, and I hope maybe it might help you, too.

Comments welcome and appreciated!




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