Presets?

[Le Chef]

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Out of interest, how many of you have created your own Lightroom presets? If you have, how and why do they differ from the standard settings? Would you be prepared to share yours?

MTIA!

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[Camaro5]

I've created some of my own and also used others, but rarely use them anymore.  Every image is a little different and while you could say presets can be a starting point, lately I just like to start with the raw file and go through my typical workflow.  Even that has changed in that it's now pretty much bare minimum in most cases.  

[Erato]

Not much that I can help with since I am not a Lightroom user.

Preset is very productive if you're familiar with your own process and know exactly what it should be.

IMHO, first thing first, getting a perfect shot before the post-processing would certainly save much time in most cases.

[wda]

Mine incorporates a ColorChecker profile, unique to my copy. I do that for all current kit.

Edited December 28, 2021 by wda

[viramati]

I have some presets I use for sharpening and a few others that I may use as start off points in B&W when not using Sileverefex Pro

[M11 for me]

Is there a difference between profile and preset?

However, I have done my special Lightroom-import-profiles for M10, Q2 and Canon R5 as i think that each camera renders colors differently and I want the RAWs to look all the same (or at least similar) after being imported. Otherwise I use no additional presets. First of all I do no mass-developing for customers. My photography is my hobby and it has not to be quick. I develop each singe photograph separately in Lightroom. Lets take last christmas: Many photographs with people and children. Their faces are sometimes much to read or too dark or too light or too pale etc. Further white balance is difficult with all the artificial light of different sources at the same time. I would not know how to go with presets. They would make everything worse. 

There was a time that I bought sets of presets. But long ago they are all gone.

Could we say that presets are productivity tools? 

 

 

Edited December 29, 2021 by M10 for me

[SrMi]

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AFAIK, in Adobe software, presets change develop settings (sliders), while profiles work in the background and all the develop sliders are unchanged.

[JoshuaR]

I have a number of presets which I’ve developed over many years. Two are general looks for color and B&W, which I apply upon import. Several more are tuned to specific places in my environment: e.g., I have one for my kitchen at night, another for our piano room (a dark room in the middle of our house with mixed lighting), another for the lawn in the summer, when the grass creates green ambient light that I don’t like, another for hard light at the beach, and so on. I basically build them by copy-pasting the settings from one photo to the next—when I discover that the same settings work very well for multiple pictures, I create a preset. 

A lot of what the presets do has to do with color and white balance, especially for indoor lighting in the house. I also have versions with S-curves and others with inverted curves, to better reflect the light on particular days. So, tl;dr, I’m a big presets guy. I don’t know if it would be useful to share them, since they’re so particular to me, but would be happy to.

[wda]

I also produce Presets for specific high ISO shots. Although seldom used, they do save time when I have suitable candidate pictures. They give me a new baseline for any further refinement. But mostly, my presets are time-savers, applying specific profiles and regular common adjustments. If a specific import requires different treatment, the clock can be turned back In the History panel, or even 'zeroed', to start afresh. I consider Presets like Quick keys or short cuts.