Skip to main content

Profiles and Presets

Lesson 4 from: Adobe Lightroom Classic CC Workflow for Photographers

Daniel Gregory

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

4. Profiles and Presets

Adobe's boring standard profiles have now been reworked -- look through the new camera profile options to give your RAW files a better foundation. Learn the difference between profiles and presets.

Lesson Info

Profiles and Presets

couple other enhancements that I was really excited about, one of which is camera profile. So in the develop module it used to be under calibration. There used to be an option for camera profiles. Adobe overhauled that, and under the basic panel now under profile here we have a whole host of profiles to work with. So if I click in here, here's the kind of standard adobe ones we would have had before. But if I go down to browse, but I now have is a whole bunch of I'm going to this more simple you. I got a whole bunch of camera profiles, so here's artistic ones and my mouse over. One of the great things they did is similar in photo shop, but I choose a blend mode. Now I can see the effect. I can actually see these before they're even applied and what they're doing to my photograph. Now, why is this important? Why is a profile important? Ah, profile is the foundation away? We assimilate the raw data. It does not adjust any of the sliders. When I use a preset, I have to move sliders and pa...

nels and all that around to get the look that the preset create. So if you apply a preset or if you go by somebody's presets and you apply that preset, you just go look at the panels and you can see everything they did to create that look. Oh, they adjusted the tone curve. They dark in the shadows, they split, toned it, they whatever they did, the profile is like I said, more foundational in that. So none of the sliders have been adjusted so I can get this artistic look right here. So I'm gonna grab artistic six, close my profile. And if you look, none of my adjustments have been made anywhere to create that kind of purple look. So now I have all of the sliders available to me to continue to make the edit. That to me it was, ah, huge change, because now I could come in and say, OK, I've got these different looks and I had a precept that I like, but I can't move those sliders, but I want I want something more than that. But I need to start from that. And so I got stuck in this little loop spot. So the profile piece is really a great element to that. Now I come in here to use my artistic browse owned by the way, just ah may ask. The monochrome here is Adobe has gone through and kind of figured out what they think is the default way. The photographs of look best The monochrome is kind of the default starting point for what Adobe, with its assumes, is this is the most the best starting place for the conversion of the black and white. So it kind of as it does its work. It figures that out for you. But that's the difference on that. But we go to browse down here at the bottom, you'll see something called user profiles. So these air profiles I've made and imported and allowed to come into light room. So I have decided, Oh, I really have a look default. Look, I like in my photographs and I want to always start with that look and then I want to edit off of that. I now get to make my own profiles. So this is that. This to me was another. The huge thing we got in one of the recent updates is the ability to create my own profile. Now, I could do this before, but it was a lot of work. I had to go into an actual sdk. I had to download to a little bunch of work. Mainly now, I could literally do it between light room and photo shop in just a couple of minutes. So we're gonna create a profile here pretty easy. Pretty easy to dio a couple little things you have to do, but not not hard at all. Oh, so easy. Even I could do it and I even the first time it worked, it didn't look good. But I at least got the profile to come in. You have to create the profile in camera raw in photo shop so you can't created in light room. When it's created in camera raw, it will show up in late room. So what I'm gonna do is we're gonna jump over to photo shop here and I've got a photograph up. It's just up. It's a photograph from Ah, a trip to Washington D. C. Several years ago. It really doesn't matter what the photograph is. You're gonna edit this photograph to get the color palette. You want the colors you want because we're gonna use a thing called a look up table to help create the color palette. I'm gonna show you two different things you can do in this profile creation. But we're working the most advanced one. First, a look up table basically tells a digital file how to assign the colors that it a seasoned views. So when it looks at a color, it says, Oh, if you get this color, the look up table says that color's actually that color. Please make it that color now, So just let you change the look and feel the image. So in this case, I'm a platinum printer. I would like to sort of look and get a ballpark idea what a Platen print might look like in light room. So I'm gonna convert the means to black and white. And then I applied ingredient map. So the great and map allows me to assign color tonal values across the gradation. I went into the Grady it map, and then I assigned the black midpoint and highlight two colors that were sort of close to my platinum prints. How did I get that? I scanned a platinum print in kind of all parked it monkey with a little bit became and created that radiant map. Once I have that, I'm gonna create the look up table. The only catch to a look up table is you have to have an adjustment layer of some kind of modified color, and you have to have a background layer so you can see here the layers called background. I have to have that layer called background. If you don't, the export tool comes up and says you need a background layer or you need an adjustment layer. It's pretty foolproof. It will tell you little what you've done wrong under file. Go to file export and you're gonna choose color. Look up table. This is the hardest part to remember. Where is that thing? And this is, by the way, how you're gonna say your desktop, Where's that thing? And Photoshopped that exports out? Does the color look up table and you'll never go to the export menu and select the word color? Look up table, but you will say it out loud. Choose color. Look up table. It's gonna come up and ask me grid points for the quality. How much kind of resolution in the look up table? How finely detailed to the look up table B medium or high is good mediums gonna be 32 grid points. Hi is gonna be 64. So either medium or high is going to pretty good, Pretty good results. I export all of the formats. You need a cube format for this process to work. But I export him all because I do, in case I want to use the color look up table somewhere else and some other program, and then I'm gonna name it Now it will name it, whatever the file is. But that's not helpful for me. It's a platinum platinum, uh, color one, I'll call it. It was okay, and it's gonna ask me where to save them. I have a folder called Let's look up Tables. If not, I will come back in six months and be like, I don't know what you pile is gone. So at least if it's in my look up table folder, they're all there. So I go ahead and click on that. I'm gonna name the Lut again. Platinum color one to save. Okay, I've created now the color look up table to create a profile. Your own profile. You do not have to have a look up table. Okay, you can create the profile. I'm sure you create the profile using just the camera raw settings. But in this case, I also wanted this additional color information to be provided. So I'm going to show you when we get into the next program, how we get both of those. But you do not have to do a look up table. It's not required. I've got any photograph open here that is a smart object. That's a raw file, and the reason for that is I can then come back in, double click on my smart object, and now I'm in the camera editor. This is the tool that's gonna build my camera profile. There is. You have to build it here. There's no other place to build it. There's no other thing to click on. You've got a building camera like it doesn't really matter what the images to create the profile. Now, if you're a landscape photographer and I've got a landscape image appearing, you're looking for a certain landscape aesthetic. You probably want a landscape photographing here because as you adjust the slider bars in here, it's easier to see what the effect is on what you're actually creating the profile for. So if you doing portraiture and you're like, I'm just gonna make all the blacks really dark the ring of the portrait and you're like, Oh, my gosh, all their hair's gone and I can't get it back. You probably should looked at a portrait when you made the profile. So doesn't matter. But other than just visually, we see things as photographers. I'm gonna come in here. And so for this particular profile, I want to make platinum prints. This is my platinum profile. They usually have a kind of a deep, black deeper shadow. They actually hold a little bit more detail in the highlights in the paper prints. So I have that the exposures usually just a little bit kind of brighter and contrast wise, easy, flat in the contrast a little bit Platon prints hold more tonal values. This is just knowledge of how the print works. That's why making that selection I planted Prince also holds some depth in the print. It's one of reasons you print, So I'm gonna add some clarity even more aggressive than I might normally my digital work, because I know the planet prints gonna hold that and then I'll just going ahead. This may be say, at a smidge of vibrance here, I could come in and apply the tone curve. I got a slight s on the tone curve here. That just helps me get a little of that contrast set. I'm gonna come over to the preset panel. Now, this is where we create that actual profile. If I come down and I've got the create new preset here, if I click on new preset pops up the preset option and I see all of my options and I get to choose what to include in my presets, this is what everybody who's ever created a preset for sees. It's the thing. If you're creating a profile that if you click on and you see this, you have for gotten to hit the Ault key on the PC or the option key on a Mac, that same create preset. If you hold down Altana piece of your option on the Mac and click on it again, you get the create new profile option. So that's the little trick to get into the create profile. Once we do that, I'm gonna call the up under the name I've got Platt 10 on. We can't spell what, Color One is gonna be the name of the profile. It's whatever you need to name it to remember what it is I would not recommend. Entitled one entitled to entitle three entitled four Workflow Name Things What they are. And then you could see here it's got basic and point curves selected for me automatically. That means there's been an adjustment in the basic panel and in the tone curve panel. If I'm like No, no, no, don't do that point curve one. I can just un check it. If I had turned on split toning split Tony, we check. So it knows there's been some sort of edit there. The look up table here up tone, strength map, eyes. How strong to the effect be applied. I usually just leave it to normal. Look up table is that in this case, it's adobe color. This is the profile, their source profile, the original profile that was used to create this color in this image. If you click into, you can browse if you built your own, I always just leave it to the look up table that I started with anyway. And then here. If you have a look up table because it's completely optional, you don't have to use those. But in this case, I created that look up table specifically for this kind of platinum Looks in this case, I click on the color look up table. I mean, my let's folder There's that platinum curve. I'm gonna load that now. Down here, it's in the color space. I'm gonna make it pro photo this we get a nice big color space and then minimum amount and maximum is the other piece. When I first loaded up, I'm like, uh, I think I want the maximum to be good. Okay. What that is is when we it's an amount slider for how strong to the effect allowed to be applied. So 0% means don't apply it at all. 100% is the default in 200% is increased effects. I'm gonna jump back in the light room. Here's that amount Slider Right here you see, if I drag it to zero, the effect of the profile is removed. If I put it to 200% the strength is increased. So what that is setting is what's this amount slider allowed to be? That's what that little those percentages are down there is how much of the effect can be applied. Once I have that I click. OK, come over here into profiles in camera, raw browse. And down here at the bottom, under user profiles. Platinum. Okay, so I always check in camera raw before I leave to make sure it showed up. Because if something went wrong and something went weird, I know it happened here. It's not a light room problem. It was a camera raw creation problem. So I checked that there, and I check it every time I learned the hard way. Okay. When I come back to light room when I come back in and I'm like, Okay, cool. I want my platinum profiles are red when light room starts, they're like I c c profiles these profiles. So all I gotta do is I gotta quit. Light room, restart light room. Those profiles get rid When light room loads. So it's the little piece. You'll come back all excited. Good. So I come back in now. I come into my artistic. I go to browse, I can run there. There's that platinum now that gave me my based starting point. And Doug, who's sitting in the audience, also is a platinum printer. So you can see I've start to got that kind of steady quality, what a platinum print would look like. And because I've done it here, I now have the option of coming up, and I can still then open up the shadows a little bit. Me like. Okay, now that's kind of close to what the print would want. None of those sliders have been moved yet, and I've got the right starting point. So now I can come in and out of my photograph to taste, however I want. When I read this, I was like, there's no way I would be able to I mean, I'm good. I'm good. I mean, I spent 20 years in the tech industry building and designing and helping signed software, and I was like all there's no animal to do this once you do it about twice your only frustrations gonna be You're going to get excited and you're gonna start building some weird stuff you're gonna be like, Oh, my gosh, that ended up kind of weird burble. So because you're gonna split tone, you're gonna get all that experiment and try. Um, but if you have a photograph you've edited and you've done all this work on and you know what it looks like and you love it, you made all of the edits. Open that up in the photo shop is a smart object. Go into camera raw and just take the default settings right there. Create the profile and call it portraiture one. Then your images will come in, and they'll just start with that city. Now, each portrait's different, maybe two letter to dark. But, you know, your saturation is gonna be in the area you want If you're a film photographer, we used to do presets, and we're gonna talk about preset uploading here in a second. I used have presets that try to mimic what my film looked like. Okay, give me sort of a velvety look bell. Be loved, saturate reds and love to saturate green and had really deep black shadows, so I would use that as a preset. Then I'd open this image up and be like there be somebody in the photograph of the landscape and that red saturation of the priest that would make their skin all weird. And I was having a monkey with this and that. Well, if I could go into the profile, I can set that and know that if I'm gonna apply that than Aiken, still have the flexibility to adjust the red sliders to pull some of that skin tone out and not have to worry about affecting the overall it means or trying to do. Multiple adjustment Brush is on top of one another to fix the problem. So a great great aesthetic, the other last pieces to survey the heavy effect. There's the heavy effect of the planting peace, and I can feather in really the strength where it should be. This color blue. When I did in a light level, this is kind of what ah starts to give me what science type from ah development chemical from a guy named Mike. Where has the mic where method of science type. It's a really deep, rich blue. So that's my starting to work on that piece. For all processes. This is a way to tie my digital and analog worlds together. With that? Yeah, a lot. There, Big one. Done rap. Probably one of the cool, cool, cool features recently. Presets. Daniel? Yes. Just a quick question before you move forward. Is there a way to know once you've you've set your clicked onto the profile? What changes? It's made to that. What? The cat? What the characteristics are of that profilers at just visual. Yeah, there is. Okay, so the profile itself. Come on. Showing finder, you could do it. The profile is in. So here is the profile for color Blue. I'm going to text at it. Um, it's compressed in there. Where? And so in a preset. So whether the same thing, if I come here instead of looking one of those, I look at a preset. So here's a preset. The preset here is sharpness. Got a radius of 0.8. The detail went toe 37. So the profile, because the preset is move slider bars, two x. I could have that, but when it's a profile, that stuff is the rendering of that initial work. Um, I'm in that a workflow off the top of my head without thinking about any of the unintended consequences. Um, in camera raw, I would set up the image I liked. I would save a preset with all of the settings that were the base peace. And then I would instantly create another profile with the same name I could then reference the preset to see what those settings were that created it, knowing that that's what the profile did, that would be my off the top of my head workflow to do that. Thank you. Why we're in here. This is another change, by the way that Adobe did and it was in UNEP, not in an effort was, in a way to make sure that light room CC and classic C C could transfer and share presets and profiles is everything got converted to an X and P files? In the old days when you built a light room preset, it was an LR preset file, and it was a kind of a private everything to just like room. Now it's been turned into an X and P file and that s and P file is then interchangeable between the programs and lets us come in and make the cool part is, if you really want to be a nerd, you can come in and edit your presets by hand. And here, So if you like No, no, no. Luminous moving should be 26. Save that. Luminess smoothing is now 26 moving forward of that profile, that preset that is one of the back end changes that was significant and what Adobe is gonna be able to do moving forward and helping manage all of this. But to a lot of us, we didn't see things where you will see that come up is occasionally you'll see that your old presets no longer work on an active cause. They need to be migrated or updated. And then it basically will read it converted into the X and P and and work from that. So hopefully that answered that actual question. I'm just wondering if you recommend making a copy of the image before you at this or can you reset it? Yeah, So I mean, at this point, I've got that weird piece on there close out of the profile by Reset goes back to the default piece. It is literally just like it's not. It's all non destructive, so it little he's just the overlay of Apply this to it. If you're in ah, you can manage your presets in here. You can right click up not any of your presets. You can just right click on delete the profile and remove it from light room so you've got your own profiles. You can't believe the adobe ones. But if I want to go back and forth from the classic to the Sisi will my profiles you can import profile into CC. So in the profile area there's three little dots. The more menu click on that will be an import profiles, and then you could just import the exact same profile. No second SEC moves it up to the cloud, basically so they know how to read it. We're gonna do real quick over to, uh, processes for two little things, and then we're gonna jump in tow editing tool, which is a big release. After what it's got. A little bit of it's really, really cool. I want to make sure we cover that before we actually get into any new element but under presets, If I do import presets now, I can actually choose a zip file. So if I had ah 100 presets before I had a little individually, I now put him in a zip file, upload the zip file, and it will then import all of the images into the false. They're down here and user presets. I just uploaded Bell via Kodachrome. In this high I s o one the high I s 0 3200 You'll see. It's kind of great out as is the C one. Still, life concessions preset. But that means is there's something in that preset that can't be applied into this existing photographs with a great out until you it's not actually available for you. So it's a nice little peace for that. The other piece around presets. It's kind of nice as I can come in now and I can manage presets and I can turn on and off which folders will display over there under presets because I can go make my own folders. So when I create a preset, I'm allowed to put it in a group so I could say I want to create a new group and I want to call this landscape and I'll call this. Ah, it's no presets. So now I have a landscape folder over here that has snow presets in it so I can start to organize and keep myself better, organizing my presets in that management. I'm also able to come in and turn off so I don't want to see. I don't do black and white work, So that's just stuff over there distracting me. I can uncheck black and white, and now that pre those presets that are grouped in there will disappear. So it's a way to help me again stay organized in my workflow. If you don't use it, make it go away. Okay, The less distraction you have, the better your work fluids. Same thing up in the toolbar. Appear in my normal toolbar. I don't do Web. I don't do slide shows unless I need him. If I'm doing a book, a map, I rarely, um, in the mat modules. Those are the kind of the four modules I use, so I mean my interface tight like that. Nothing to distract me. That's part of my consistency Roll. My workflow is Don't show me things I don't use And if I do need it, I know that Oh, there are There are black and white filters I had to do the with classic My favorite, my favorite preset is zeroed out. Zero does is it takes whatever I have applied and it takes it back to zero. Removes. Everything's like sharpening. Everything just goes to zero. So sometimes I I over at it. Sometimes I make bad mistakes. Sometimes I'm the only one so zeroed out. So it's under the classic General. So I turned classic general back on to get access again to that zeroed peak. So you've got that little editing piece in there, so that's Ah, I think it really kind of nice way to stay organized. I want to jump into on this adjustment lives in the linear Grady Int the Radio Grady Int, and it lives in the adjustment brush, and it's luminosity masking color, range masking, and there's depth masking. If you're shooting one of the new phones that has, apple just created the verb Boca. So if you're Boca in or whatever their little commercials, if you're it, will go in and based on focus, depth of field actually create a mass based on focus, but you have to be shooting one of the cameras that supports that. So it's the new IPhone and I think the new Samsung does the same thing, but I know for sure, but it's in that that world will see those three elements.

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

I watched this course live. Really good!. Of course, I like all of Daniel Gregory's classes. It's a real treasure when one finds a really good teacher who thinks like oneself. I thought that I already knew Lr well so I was really surprised about how much I learned from this course. I learned so many ways to improve my workflow efficiency.

Warren Gedye
 

This was a great course. Daniel certainly explains it well and in terms I can understand! Super worth it and learnt loads of new tricks! Great job!!

Anne Dougherty
 

I was impressed by the amount of information covered in depth, and by Mr Gregory’s teaching style. I’m somewhat new to Lightroom and found his explanations of its capabilities, and why you would use it rather than Photoshop for specific processes, enormously helpful. I especially appreciated his lessons covering printing. This is invaluable information. Great class.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES