Lessons

Lesson Info

Making Presets in Lightroom CC

Now that we understand where they exist let's talk about making those presets all right let's go teo a set of photos? Well, this one work okay? So I want to do something to this photograph so when I start out I've already got it normalized it's all good to go but now I want to add some kind of a style to it so I have done all the work here in the basic area the question is what do I want to do beyond that? What kind of style do I want to put to this photograph? So at this point I'm gonna make a style making a style gives me permission to go into these bottom areas, but if you're not making a style if you're just doing jobs, you don't have permission to be here you need to be doing it over here inside of your pre sets which were going to make but when you're when you're first starting out and you're like I need some styles to put on there take some extra time monkey with the styles make sure the styles of the way you like him and then make the presets and then from then on out you apply...

the presets don't go in and start monkeying with styles because you'll be able to apply them to any image so I'm going to go through and I'm going to go into the tone curve so let's make a cross process that some good, right? So we'll make a cross process first thing I want to do is I'm going to give it a little bit of a kind of ah, a serious punch in the contrast so I'm gonna have a little serious punching the contrast, but because it's film I'm going to take my blacks, I'm going to bring him up a bit so that I don't ever really get a true black and I'm going to take the whites down a little bit so don't ever get and absolutely true white hope that's way too much there we go, okay, so there's my curve, I've already got that set now I'm going to go into the reds, greens and blues and that's where I'm going to make my cross process look so I'm going to give the read a little bit so that's gonna be more red in the highlights, but it's going to be kind of normal or a little less red kind of, uh cooler in the shadows and I'm going to take everything down a bit here so that I get instead of blue I'm getting more of a green got to green well that down a bit and give a little bit of green in the shadows let's go back up to the sari to the blues let's take the blues like that? Okay, so that's got an interesting color tone to it so now we've got the tone curve finished now let's go into our h s l hs l a is where you can change individual colors increased saturation luminant ce those kind of things so this is like uh if I wanted a sky to be darker, I could go into the luminous and pull the blue down um in this case what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take the the saturation on the reds and I'm gonna pull him down a little bit same with the saturation is on the orange and the yellow so I just want those to be a little bit more limited and then I'm gonna allow the saturation on the blue to come up just a little bit um just to kind of give it a look that there's just no chance that this was normal you know? We wanted I don't want to much red in the cheeks but I want the reds to kind of come out so we're just kind of helping toe further institute a very unique style to this image and I like the greens that air coming out in here like the limited oranges there I also think that I ought to take the saturation on this down just a little bit so that it's not quite so punching the saturation so I went down ten um and then I'm going to go into the effects I want to add some grain to this so I'm going to go umm into the grain add some grain add some roughness to the grain so that you can see what it's gonna look like let's just take a look at that so that looks really nice I like that grain it's nice and rough um there you go. All right cool so that is my style I want to add that style to other photographs now so now I'm going to go in and I'm going teo do a preset I'm gonna put it in my life older and I'm going to call this a cross process with grain and we're just going to say it's kind of ah red highlight green shadow okay, that gives me a really good idea now noticed the name on it the name is such that I ca n't tell exactly what it's going to be before I click it the other thing that I will do in my presets that I'm not doing right now is I will put a code at the beginning so I'll say you know zero zero one zero zero to that kind of thing the idea is that because it's an alfa near miracle naming system if you don't put a code at the front it's all in alphabetical order and that's not gonna help you when you're looking for things because cross process will end up in the same places sayin a types and that's not an organized structure. So what you want to do is you want to say all of my cross processes are going to be in the one oh one range and all of my scientist types will be in the the zero that the ten range and all of my black and whites will be in the twenty range or you know that kind of thing, so if you nd if you leave some space and you're not in your nomenclature, then you can you can give yourself room to expand so you can say, oh, this is a cross process, so it goes anywhere from one hundred to one hundred and ninety nine, so now you have ninety nine slots for other cross processes to be and you may only have three, but that helps you to grow. So I'm going to not put that in because I'm gonna let you guys decide where you want that to be, but I really do think you should go in and code you're presets so that they all fall in line now. Once you've done that, you need to turn and check none on this, so I checked none on everything the one thing that stays checked is the process version because we're making this in light room six or light room c c it's that it's maintaining the process version of two thousand twelve because it assumes that we want to stay in the present two thousand twelve process version I have in the past made all of mine so that all of my presets are independent of the process version because most of the time, the things I'm monkeying with don't get changed by the process version. And so if you're in light room three and you click the button, it will do the same type of thing that it would do in light room four, because the process version isn't clicked, if you click the process version, whatever you do will take you to the process version you're currently in. So right now we're in twelve two thousand twelve, so if someone with light room three where to click on it, they can't get two thousand twelve and so they'll click on it and it'll do the same thing because we haven't done anything that's unique. But if someone's in, if you make a preset in light room three that says two thousand ten and someone in light room c c clicks on it, it will take them back to the two thousand three or the two thousand ten process version, and so some of the things that they have will disappear and the photo will change. Because you changed the process version and therefore you change the sliders in the basic exposure so they all go back to zero so khun monkey with you so just be aware that if you click on this you are forcing people into your process version at this point I am so uh confident that people should not be in light room three anymore that I am publically now on creative live telling everyone I will no longer make uh any more presets that keep you in light room three if you were there because I really don't think you should be there I think you should be at least in for five or c c like you got a lotta options other than the one you're in and so I'm going to force everyone to light room c c or five at least or four put you in two thousand twelve so okay so what we need to do is we need to decide what actually is important to this effect so you guys call it out to two people mike's grab you mike's call him out tell me what's tell me what's important to this effect anybody out on the internet drunkard out it out what's that tone curve tone curve okay we did the tone curve what else do we do saturation saturation so we brought saturation down which is right there grain grain we did grain what else? I can refer to treatment color, anything did we do color we did color adjustments remember we brought the reds down a little bit we brought the blew up a little bit right are the greens or something like that cools so we have to do that one but did we touch vibrance no we didn't so should we click it no no because what will happen is if I touched the vibrance now it'll take vibrance to zero see how we have to think so at this point when you're making a preset you have to actually start thinking you have to think what did I touch and if I touch it will it ruin someone's photo that they don't show you on ly click the things that are absolutely essential to this so let's say and the grain is a debate because I might want to turn this on and not have grain and so should I include grain in the effect or not my my feeling on it as if it's a cross process and I want it to look like film I will add the grain because I wanted to feel like film and it's a one touch to film but the really the numbers were these if when you click it fifty one percent of the time you will be happy with it then you leave the grain in if when you click it forty nine percent of the time you will be happy with it you leave the grain out because that means you just saved yourself two percent changes right? Does that make sense? So if you're going to always keep it as grain or most of the time occasionally you might have to remove it leave it in but if you're going to do the opposite and most of the time you're going to want the green out, leave the grain out and add the grain in saves you a lot of klicks so it's one of those thinking games you have to say what am I going to do on a regular basis? So now let's look and see if there's anything else? Oh there's clarity did we had clarity? Sometimes I add clarity let me cancel and take a look at that because sometimes I add clarity we have ten clarity on there, but I didn't add it specifically sometimes I had clarity because it helps to get the because grain softens and image and so clarity helps to sharpen it back up underneath. You could also do that with sharpening. So sometimes when you make grain you might want to add a little bit of something to sharpen the underlying image so that when the grain goes over and softens it it's back to kind of normal so I got to think about those things when you're creating it and think what is going to be best for my cause and so I think she looks great so I and by the way, if you use grain, you very rarely have to retouch grain is the most beautiful retouching tool there is because if I turn, I want you to see this if I turn off the grain, someone turn off the effects right now and you can see look at that she could use a little retouching now, but you only saw that retouching now because the grain got turned off. But as soon as I turned that grain back on, suddenly that's all softened up and maybe the only one you see now is that one big one right there, but you wouldn't have seen it had I not turned the grain off, so grain is amazing for creating because you know what brains doing when it's doing that the human eye wants to follow lines, and as soon as you put something to cross over a line, the human eye goes, I can't go any further and it goes somewhere else because we follow the path of least resistance at all times and so anywhere, any time, if you have a leading line kind of let's say you have ah ah of meandering stream going up a landscape, right? The I will keep following it until a bridge happens soon as the bridge happens, the I'll go and go somewhere else because that line gets intersected grain is intersecting all lines it's crossing lines all over the place and so what happens is you don't see those blemishes because the blemish is a circular line you only see it if the if the I can follow it all the way around once you cross it though I can't follow around and just dismisses it because it's too hard tto look and like rebuild the circle so we just go somewhere else so your brain is dismissing it all it's still there but your brain dismisses it so grain is your best friend I love it I I'll apply grain especially if I'm doing like a senior portrait okay people who do senior portrait ce or even boudoir they get so worried because their client's going to come in and see these images where they're not totally retouched and so then they re touch one hundred images so they could show their client one hundred images and so they just spent, you know, say ten in its or five minutes or whatever on each image getting them looking nice and they didn't even do a great job because they were just doing as many actions and whatever so this now the hair's still kind of matted together because they softened the whole thing instead of just the face you know? So they're they're they're doing a poor job it retouching and they're doing it for a long time and then the client buys three pictures or five pictures well, they could've done the re touching on three or five pictures saved himself a lot of time and made money on everything they retouched but they don't think that way and they think all the client will only buy if it's been perfected had grain if you add grain to everything and just chunk it up making it and then the client will see it and they won't see they won't really see the grain because they're going to see it here they're not going to see it zoomed in like that they're going to see it like this and they will be fine then soon as it's time to retouch turn off the grain do the retouching goto photoshopped smooth out the skin whatever and then when you come back if you want you can turn the grain back on if you don't want to leave the brain off so the grain helped you to sell the image to the client because it kind of helped to soften everything and then when you go to do the siri's retouching you can go and fix the underlying problems if they're going to print you know big print they're going to see all these you know, a scar, a blemish or something like that okay all right, that was an interesting diversion lesson but yes, you have to get a question from a pro photographer how do you determine how large the grain should be forgiven photo! The grain should be as large as the I can resolve. Okay, the eyes the is the tell. So if I zoom in here at one hundred percent and I can see those eyes sparkle on whatever migraine is fine if the grain is somehow interfering with the ability to look into the eye than it's too much. So you any detail? Yeah, just look at the detail looking and I look at whatever, so I'm gonna turn on the grain now and see I still see the eyes the eyes are still fine, but if I take the grain higher if I take the grain up, you know, in the amount in the size up watch what happens to that? See, I can't see the eye now it may look really pretty is grain and all artistic and whatever, but the eyes are now mushy, so I can't can't go that high. So it's, just a question of when does the I start resolving and give you some? You know, sharp detail, but still give you that graining look that's where you want to stop, don't go past that point, everything else can kind of go wherever, but the eyes have to stay sharp, okay, so we have made a a preset got to go back in and re do it because I escaped to find out if we need dad sharpness so what do we call this we called it a cross process with grain uh red highlight green shadow okay I'm putting it in the right folder into the live presets because we're going to give them to everybody owns the course on dh we said we wanted the saturation color did the tone curve and we did the grain and that's pretty much everything we did and then we have to ask ourselves if we want to add the clarity um I'm going to say no I'm gonna go with whatever so the image will determine the clarity so that's the thing I'm gonna hit create once I've hit create I'm going to make a completely different preset now and I'm going to go down to the effects and I'm gonna take the grain to zero any time you make a preset you make several other pre sets at the same time so I pulled the grain to zero I go hit at again and I'm going to say remove grain and then I'm making that same one but this time I am checking none and I on ly touching the grain and hitting create and now if I happen to click this one it has the grain right below is the grain remover so that I don't have to go hunting for I just go no, I don't want the grain on this one so it's quick click instead of click oh got to go over here and remove the grain so any time if you do something with a vignette so you do a master uh I do a master type of pre set with a vignette on it make sure you have a remover for that vignette too it's just a matter of going in turning off the effect that you just added and on lee targeting that one thing with that check box and then saying name it remove whatever removed grain removing yet removed this remove that if you have a black and white siri's of effects right below the black and white, you should have a button that says restored a color time that way no matter where you are no matter what you're doing when you're over here and you start clicking, you always have the ability to unclip things so if you look at my everyday favorites folder, which is what everybody is getting that owns the course, you can see that anywhere that I have. So I've got some split tones here, right? And I've got a restored a color so there's black and white if I were to add black and white and then I've got some split tone stuff and then I've got to restore to color but if you look down here I've got cross process this that this that this soft saturation color but then there's grain removed grain serious noise reduction but everywhere that I have something I'm gonna have a remove post crop vignette I'm goingto have restored a color I'm going have removed um the uh split tone all of those things there's little remove ear's in there so that when I click on something I just oh I want this but I want to remove that the other thing to be aware of is that if you are making split toning of facts when you make them even if you make him black and white split tone effects so let's say I went in and I said I'm going to make a black and white image and I'm in and by the way do you see what just happened that black and white tone that I just added I just turned into black and white the tone curve is still colored because the red blue and green are those curves are still active and so it makes a really amazing split town in fact I think the tone curve is a much better place to make split tones than the split town ing is but if you use the two in conjunction with each other you can get really tricky um but but the important thing here is that all of my presets are so targeted that when I hit black and white it doesn't remove anything else and so that color still exists if I want it there it's there so if you target things well enough then you khun you can kind of sneak it in and so we had a question earlier where someone said can you make presets additives so that they're not overriding and there's the key if you want your presets to be additive in that way you need to target them so specifically that they can sneak under so you have like all these layers of things happening and basically you can consider every single one of these sliders a layer and what you can do a sneak under one of the layers and you can shove something under there or you can pull something out from underneath because it's like the trick where you grab the you grab the tablecloth and you yank it out and none of the glasses fall over that's what you can do with this if you design your presets right then that preset will yank those out from underneath right? So now what I'm going to do is I'm going teo I want that black and I really like that black and white effect so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to watch this so I'm designing a set of pre sets for you and I'm going to hit plus and I'm going to go you want this effect that has the black and white with this really funky split toning right that's a cool effect so what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a pre set that says black and white and I'm just going to say I want black and white not the mix just the black and white treatment turn off the grain and hit create oh hello uh that already exists live presets that isn't already exist I don't see it well I'm gonna call it black and white to then actually I'll just call it b w basics and then I'll have create there okay so I have bw basics but if if we were to go to let's go to some other completely different image so let's go to one of our go to r h d are here and go back into the develop module so in the hdr if I were to come over and hit black and white basics itjust went to black and white do you see that the tone is not there because I've given you the option to use this first gives you the color and then if you want to add it to black and white and create the black and white with that tone of giving you two options now and I've actually with two presets given you four options you see how that you economize the number of pre sets that you have to build by targeting him so now three presets is really nine because you have three presets and you can put them together in three different ways and so now you have nine that kind of a thing does that make sense? So the more the more targeted you are, the less presets you need and you can still create more because it's called permutations that's the only thing I know about math that's it ask me anything else? I don't know it, but I do know about permutations and so I can create more permutations with smaller targeted things, the more general they are, the less I can create permutations and so I have to make more I remember when I first got light room bairam one maybe it was two or something and there was this guy that built these presets and I was like these air cool presets, right? I did haven't even thought about you know what to do with presets and whatever and so I was looking around and what do these presets and started looking at people and they were downloading him for free and all that. So I grab some presets and I looked at him and this guy had probably five or six hundred presets you downloaded and put him in your system, but they're all in one line they weren't put up into folders, so instead of thirty at the time you were really had to scroll through the whole thing and they weren't really organized very well and you just have to scroll like this to find something and it was like there was black and white positive one stop black and white no stop black and white minus one stop black and white was see peotone positive one stop black and white cp and not you know and it was just like every permutation was actually in the thing and I was like, if you want to do that, you take all of those and put them like this if you just said black and light plus minus normal and then you could do like ad see pia and four could have done the job of, like thirty five of this guy's so that's when I realized we have a problem and that is that no one understands the economy of that space, you do not wanna have to scroll at like this in order to find your presets. So basically what I've done is I say I only will allow my preset folders to get big enough to maybe scroll one time and usually I'll just close the navigator so I can see see how that almost fits so my favorites almost fit within one scroll and here's the other key keep all of your presets closed except for the one you're using so close all of your preset panels that you're not using an on lee keep the one open so that you don't have to scroll very far to find the rest so I could go it's like quick and I could go down to like the normal ones that come with light room, which I never use and by the way which you can't get rid of, that doesn't make any sense like why I can't remove this folder of presets drives me nuts it like fills up that place but I can't remove it okay? So that is building a preset now when we go over here to the right hand side and we start working with with brushes and things like that, then we're working with completely different presets they're in a different place we showed you where they are but when you looking at those it's just a matter of the sliders here now we're not we don't get like a check box what do you want to include in this? It literally is all of these sliders is what you're going to get so if I went in to make a brush setting and I made that setting exposure up and contrast up highlights down and all that kind of stuff and I and I set up my brush the way I wanted it or are my affect the way I wanted it and I went in to add it and I say save current settings and new preset this is all I get which means that it's on ly going to give me one thing which is everything I've said so each effect is its own thing you can't target things like that so you have to be kind of specific about it and that's why you'll see that my preset here is I have a light burn one stop burn and then burn baby burn and that's like for taking something that's bright and taking it and making it black so I use that a lot when I have like perfect lip thing and then there's some little thing out in the background that's like a got some stray light hitting and it's bright and it's taking my eye but it's in the darkness and I'll take burn baby burn and just it just it's literal like a four stop burn everything highlights shadows everything goes down and I could just make that black something that's white it could go completely black so it's very useful occasionally um and then there's dodge brushes and smart dodges and all of that kind of stuff but notice that they also have zero one, two, three, four, five and then whatever I want to add something in in the mix and want to keep it in that spot I just put a six a six b sixty so they all kind of stay in that area so I have twenty six spaces in between each one that I could add a second or a third version of it and I just keep adding to it okay all right so same thing it's very easy to make these presets what what isn't included in the presets is the brush the brush itself doesn't change see that line that line is what says nothing on the preset matters after this line so the preset stops in this line and then the brush starts and in your brush you haven't eh a b and in a race so if you keep a one thing and keep being another so you can see I've got a low flow and be at one hundred percent flow and then I've got a race at one hundred percent and it kind of maintains it maintains those I actually can't hit race because I'm not I haven't done anything so and then of course you've got your auto mask and density and that wall be included in that a bebe russia's well and by the way when you're brushing so if I if you know if I were brushing something here if I want to erase quickly all have to do is hold the option key down and it turns into an eraser so when you're doing some you know work and burning and dodging just hold the eraser key down which is the option and then just to race out and then go back and so you can go back and forth without him to come over here and click so that's a useful feature all right, any questions? Okay, question is here what is there a, uh, preset editor or presidents editor so that you could, uh, tweak the those without applying it, modifying it and then re saving it? So can you load it and then edit it to make sense? Eso when you're working on a preset and let's, go back to my, uh other image here when you're working on a preset, the best way to work on a pre set is to go, especially if you're working on like you've got someone else's preset you want to play around with it, the best way to do that is to click on that pre set. Now you've got all of the things that are dealing with that air being dealt with in that pre set, and then you'll tweet whatever it is you want to tweak and then go over here and make a new preset based on that. So you're kind of taking a template and working off of that. But you have to understand what's happening in the preset for you to edit it because remember, when you go to this ad, you're always going to get this dialog box that tells me these are the things that are involved in this preset you have to choose what they are it doesn't show you what was involved it shows you what you last involved in the last thing that you made and so you have to know which means you have to reverse engineer you have to undo and then you have to look and then you have to redo it so I'm gonna click on it and nothing in the basic changed nothing should change in the basic that's how I make my presets that's why they work that's why they're not destroying images so I want to find out what oh it's tone curveball back watch this one hundred percent tone curve happening there now are the effects changing any? So I'll click on here yet effects air changing so any time you see that go like this, you know that has to be involved, so then you click on that so when you go toe add a preset, then you'll say okay, I know that the tone curve was involved I know that the ya grain was involved, etcetera, because I watched the things move and that's how I figured out what was involved and that's how you'll fix a lot of things because you'll buy presets online that look really cool on one image, but then when you use it on some other image it doesn't look cool because they're designed for lee a really well designed preset you will be ableto work on your image and then click the pre set and it won't ruin it. It'll it'll enhance it. It'll change it a little bit, but it won't ruin it. A bad does a badly designed preset is literally going to change your photo from what you just adjusted and that's the kind you want to get rid of or you want to redesign them. A lot of times redesigning is just opening it up, playing with it, watching it and then any time it's changing something that shouldn't be changed like anything in the basic editing area. You turn that off, so when you make the preset again u turn off those basic editing areas and leave the other things that are important and then save it and then delete the old one and let's say you download these presets that I'm making and you you like this one, that one and the other one we don't like this one or your cpl should look a little bit different than my cpu, which is a good idea, so go ahead and tweak it ri say that delete mine now you have your own and that's yours, it's what you like, I'm giving you starting points, but you should time to take off from there, okay, let's, see, um, any other questions yeah, that panel it pops up that says marked the changes that you put that seems redundant, I mean shouldn't know, like on the other on the other side of presets that doesn't happen. It knows where you put the slider burgers. Yeah, but if it did that, think about the result of what you're asking it to do if it automatically assumed I touched these slider. So I want you to make this preset. Then when I open that dialogue or when I didn't open that dialogue and it just made a preset, if I had adjusted the exposure, it would add the exposure to the preset, even though I don't want the exposure included because I want the exposure to be individual to you, jj image, but the effect on everything else I want. And so a lot of times when you're making a preset, you adjust the photo first, then you add some style, and then you make the preset, but you don't want the adjustments. You just want the style so that's why it doesn't do that, so be thankful that it doesn't do that.