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Lesson Info

Lightroom Profiles

What we're gonna talk about now is profiles. And, I'm gonna start, and I'm gonna bring you into the pool one toe at a time. But by the end of this lesson, you're going to be drowning. I'm just promising you that you will be drowning. And you will be like, you're gonna go (lips buzzing) and there's gonna be fried brains. Okay? All right. So, at the point that your brain starts to fry, don't check out, just think of it as entertainment. Okay, all right? All right. Okay here we go. Profiles, profiles are like presets. They used to exist down at the very bottom of Lightroom in the Calibration tool area, so right here. There used to be a little area that said Profile, and you would check a profile, and it came with a certain set of profiles. It came with Adobe Standard, and then it came with Adobe Landscape and Adobe this and Adobe that, and then it had some from your camera maker that Adobe had made to try and make your images look like they do on the back of your camera. And so there was ...

like Canon natural, Canon landscape, Canon this, Canon that. And every camera would show a different set because when they got your camera and reverse engineered it, they would try and build those profiles to match it as closely as they could. So, that was a profile, and the profile has always been there, and it's always been the same thing, but it wasn't up at the top so no one was using it. And they're incredibly powerful, because what they are is they're a definition of color that underlies the entire photograph. So think of it as this. You've got this raw data, you've got all of these ones and zeroes. And the ones and zeroes have no, like they're agnostic. They don't care what they are, they're just ones and zeroes floating around in the little pool of ones and zeroes. But each one and zero has to be somehow defined in order for when in the end you see them, they look a certain way. So this little red pixel has to be defined so that it knows what red actually should look like. So, you captured red. The camera just saw red and captured a one or a zero or 20 million ones and zeroes, or whatever, and those said what red was. But it's just what was out there. Now it has to go through a profile that says, okay we're gonna define red as more of an orange, or a burnt umber. And that definition then is what's delivered to Lightroom and then Lightroom sees the burnt umber instead of red. So the profile is the definition, or the language that's being presented to Lightroom. And then Lightroom then controls it, and starts working with that color. And it uses sliders and it uses manipulation, and curves, and brightness, and shadow, and hue/saturation and luminance. But it's taking the burnt umber and brightening it up or darkening it down or shifting it one side or the other. But the profile is always underlying it. So if you have a profile that doesn't allow for red, Lightroom will never be able to give you red, ever. Because it doesn't exist. The profile could literally remove red from the vocabulary. And then it could only give you everything but red, because the red wouldn't exist. It's like someone gave you a painting kit without red. Okay, you could get close, you could approximate like something, but it's not going to be red. Okay, so you have all these profiles that were already there. Well what Lightroom, or what Adobe did is inside of Lightroom, they decided that this was too powerful a tool to be hidden at the bottom. And so they brought it to the top, and so now it's actually above your basics. It's actually above your temperature, tint, and all that kind of stuff. Because it's actually the first thing, it's the gateway into working on a photo. But before it was just hidden, now it's up front. And with putting it up front, they also put a lot of attention into reprogramming it and making sure it was better. And they even updated all their profiles, so their profiles are prettier. So they've got all of this works that's gone into this little profile area, and it's all for you and you really got to get to know it. And it's all nondestructive, so you can play and have fun, and it's not gonna hurt you in any way, shape, or form. So what we do is we go here and there's a drop-down menu that gives you certain ones, and those are things that you've used in the past, and stuff like that. And you can then browse it, or you can click on this little browse button, it's the same thing, and it pulls up this little drop-down menu set, and basically you're in an entire different, notice that there are no controls in here, just profiles. So if I close that up, there's all of your adjustments. Once you hit the profile, you're in a different window, because it has to get the definition before it can start working on it. So I'm gonna go here and look at the general Camera Raw ones first. And it shows you what it's gonna look like and do you see what's happening to the picture to the left? As I float over it, it changes. I can see in full, not just up in the little up in the navigator on the left like it used to be, now it's showing right here full screen what it's gonna look like. I see, notice that it, see how the shadows get a little bit more intense in certain ones, and then they go away in others, right? But I can see exactly what it's gonna look like, so I like the Portrait, so I click on it and then close it, and now Portrait is the underlying definition on which I'll work on this image. But, so that you can see what's going on, if I hit Reset on this photo so there's no adjustments whatsoever on the photo, and I go into a profile and click on it, and then close this up, notice that nothing's changed. Profiles are like presets that don't slide sliders. So now you can use profiles and presets in tandem. So you first use a profile to get your basic idea. Do I want this to be an old vintage photo? Do I want it to be black and white? Do I want it to be a portrait? Is it a landscape, whatever. I start there, and then once I've started there, then I can go over to my presets and start playing around with those, or just start adjusting the sliders, either one. Because the presets adjust sliders, that's just what they do. Okay, so, that is the idea. But I want you to notice something else. Not only do you have what the Adobe camera maker, or what Adobe put in there, they also have camera matching ones that are more likely to match your camera than the old ones. So if I click on Neutral or Portrait, like Portrait used to be horrible. It never looked like anything good, but now it's a little bit better. I still like Standard quite well. And I like Faithful quite well. So if I like one I hit this little star button, and that adds it as a favorite, so now all the ones that are up here that are the ones that I'll most likely use. So then you don't have to go digging around every single time you're looking for a profile. You just find the favorites. Now, notice that there are other ones down here, like Artistic. So Artistic and Vintage, and Modern, those are all ones that come with Lightroom, Adobe put them in there. So there's more stylistic type options. So let's just go to Vintage and look through the Vintage ones, and you can see that you've got all of these cool looking, like I like that one quite a bit so let's put that one in my favorites. And then I like, ah, that's all the vintage ones I like. So I've got one vintage one I like. Let's look at the modern ones, and kind of go through. So this is what you ought to do is just kind of, I like that one so let's click on that one, and I think that one might be the winner. But now I've got all of these up here in my favorites, and I can just kind of cycle through and find the one that I like the most. And you're gonna find out that most of your images are gonna have like one, two, maybe three total, and then you're not gonna use any other ones. Because you're gonna love these certain things. So just find the ones you love, put them in your favorites, and then use those. And, you can apply a profile from a preset. So once you figure out which ones you like, you never have to come back here ever again. You just apply them with a preset. And it can apply it with other things, or just on its own. So just click the preset and be done. So, the other thing that you'll notice though is that I have some here. See, Black and white Art Pro by Jared Platt, and Color Art Pro by Jared Platt. So I made profiles as well, which means you can make profiles, okay? Now, at the end of this lesson you might find it's too complicated to make profiles. I don't want to get there because my mind blew up while I was doing it, so I'm just gonna go buy some, or I'm gonna borrow some from a friend, or I'm gonna download some free ones from the internet. And by the way, I have free ones that anyone can go and get right now. So if you're really interested in the profiles and you want to start playing with them, if you go to jaredplatt.com and go to my shopping area, there is a free profile download there. All you do is check in like you're buying it, but it's free. And it's got four, two black and whites, and two colors. It's a freebie, so just go download it, have fun, play with it. And right next to it is a full collection, so both of these collections are in there, and they're on sale for 20 bucks. So, go and get those if you're interested in them, but the point is, is that because you can make them, now you can choose exactly what your photos, you want them to look like. And it doesn't have to be just what Adobe made for you. You can make them yourself, or you can have a more technical friend make them for you, or whatever. Like me, I'm your technical friend. So, we are looking at a profiled image right now, and then we can start adjusting our image on top of that. Okay? Is everybody clear on that? Okay, the next thing I need to show you is that there was a big change in where those things went. So, in the past if you went to Lightroom, Preferences, and you clicked on this button right here, Show Lightroom Presets Folder, and by the way this is a great reason to buy this course, because you're gonna have to watch this like three times to get it right. So, right now, this button doesn't lead you to the right place, because it's still leading you to the old place. Hopefully that will be fixed. But, I'm gonna show you where it is so that in the interim while we're waiting for them to fix it, you'll know where it is. But then later on, maybe months from now, it'll fix it, and still when you click on this it's gonna take you to the place where they exist. This is where they exist. They're in your library, inside of the Application Support, Adobe folder, and then they used to be inside this folder called Lightroom. Which makes sense, right? Because they're for Lightroom. And then you would find Color Profiles in this thing called Color Profiles. That makes a lot of sense, right? And then you would also find your presets in the Develop Preset folder, which also makes sense. But as soon as you update to the newer version of Lightroom, after Lightroom April 2018, if you go back to this folder, you'll find that your presets have a weird name. See the little two tildes in front of it? That means that it took those, it converted them into a new version, because it had to update every preset and every profile to a new version to fit with the math that they're using, and it moved them. So these are old. They're not being used. Those two tildes mean not in use, all right? And it took them and it converted them to the new version. So these old versions were what's called a .lrtemplate. So if I hover over that, see that? It said .lrtemplate, that's the file name. They're no longer that kind of a file name. Now they're a .xmp. Does everybody recognize that name? Because an XMP is what? Information on what to do with the photo. So now all of your presets and all of your profiles are .xmp files because it's common. It's just information about what to do with the photo. And so, I'm gonna show you where that is. Okay, so remember, we were in the Lightroom folder here. This is where it showed us we were. And generally we would have gone in here inside of this Lightroom folder to find those. It's not there anymore. Now, now it goes up to the CameraRaw folder. CameraRaw folder right here. I click on CameraRaw and inside CameraRaw there is a folder called Settings. Settings is where all your presets are. And if you look at Settings, there's a rational reason for it. It's because this folder is shared with Camera Raw. So now Camera Raw can actually do, so if you have settings in Lightroom you also have the same presets and the same profiles in Camera Raw. So no longer are you like, oh I miss the fact that I, you know. Now it's the same. Camera Raw and Lightroom have the same presets in them. Cool? Good. So they look like this now, see that? So now it's a .xmp file. And if we go to CamreaProfiles, there's camera profiles, but it's all inside this CameraRaw folder. So you need to be aware of that. If you're looking for presets or for profiles, they're no longer in the Lightroom folder, they're in the CameraRaw folder because Camera Raw is the engine that runs it all. Now, how do we make a profile? This is what we're gonna do. We are going to go to, the first thing that you have to do is you have to go to what's called a 3D LUT maker, and it's about a $250 program, so it's fairly expensive. But if you go to a 3D LUT maker program, this is what that looks like. And you would simply go in and say I want to open an image. And hopefully it's gonna find that image. It's kind of a dog of a program, it's a tough little program. There we go, okay, so I have an image here. And what I want to do with that image is I want to change the color, the underlying color structures. So what I do is, see all this information? This is color information. And with a LUT, and by the way you can make LUTs inside of Photoshop as well. So you can make Photoshop LUTs as well. If you don't know how to make a Photoshop LUT there's lots of videos on it. But I'm showing you how to make a really great LUT. Like this is the best LUT maker available. A LUT is a lookup table. It's basically saying, red is going to be what, blue is going to be what? So what I'm doing is I'm creating a LUT by saying, I don't want this to have any purple. I want all purple to be nearly nothing. So I'm taking all of the brilliance of color out of purple, and out of blue, right? And it's only gonna have like greens and turquoise. And then I can go in and say, I want all of my curves, so I can say curves, I want to change the entire structure of the photo so that all of my light areas are much, much lighter, and all of my dark areas get much, much darker. So I'm gonna add a lot more contrast to things. And then I can go in and say that I want, let's see, oh this is great. I can take green, I don't want any green in my photo. I want it all to be red, so if you see green in the photo, I want it to change it to red. Do you see how I'm defining colors? And it's all based on these very three dimensional color information, right? And then what I'm gonna do from that, and the same thing would be true if I made a LUT inside of Photoshop. I'd make adjustments to a TIFF file, and then once I made those adjustments to a TIFF file, I would save them out as a LUT file, a lookup table. So I'm gonna then File, I'm gonna save this, and actually I can just save it right here. Save the 3D LUT. So I save that LUT out, and once I've saved that LUT out to my desktop, then I'm going to have a, hold on, it looks like this. And it says .cube on it. So a .cube file is a look up table. And it knows what colors are. So it says, you've got green, I'm gonna make it red. You've got blue, I'm gonna make it gray, all right? So once it does that, then when you go into, and we're just gonna go into Photoshop, let's get rid of this. So we're gonna go into Photoshop, and we're gonna open a file. It doesn't matter what file, so we're just gonna open a DNG, and it's gonna open it up inside of Camera Raw, which is still the same thing as what you're looking at in Lightroom. And what we're gonna do is we're going to, we can adjust things here, and by the way you can actually make a camera profile without ever making a 3D LUT too. So that whole thing that I just showed you is how to do it really right. But you can actually skip that step and just make a simple profile that's not so amazing, right here. And what you're gonna do is you're gonna play with your image, and adjust it, and maybe even go in and change some of the hues and saturations, like let's say we're gonna take the saturation of oranges down a lot, and then we're gonna bring the blues up quite a bit, that kind of thing. And then once we've done that, we're gonna go to the area where we would make a preset, which is this area. If you're not familiar with Camera Raw, that's the area for presets. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click on the preset area, and then I'm gonna go down here and make a preset. So you're all familiar with making presets in Lightroom. Are you familiar with making presets in Camera Raw? Same thing, adjust your sliders, then go over to the little preset Save button and hit Save. But instead of hitting Save, just like this, it would save a preset. And by the way, that preset would then be available in Lightroom, because they're connected. Instead what you're gonna do is you're gonna hit the Option key, and you're gonna click the same Save button, and voila. More options come up. And those options allow you to make profiles. So I'm gonna say this is a Test Profile, and we're going to save that in our profile area. And then I can tell it which things that I've worked on that I want to use inside of the profile. And I could say none of these, or I could say well let's just keep the HSL Adjustments only, but not the Basic adjustments, because those change all the time, right? So then I'm gonna go to the Advanced Settings here, and I can do Tone Map Strength. This is, Low is where you want to be. If you do High it makes it a little more like a HDR look, which not so great. So keep it low. You can experiment, but this is where I would keep it. And then you're going to come down here and look for a 3D Lookup Table. So we made a color lookup table. You can also make black and white ones, but that one requires you to do stuff with that. So you have to actually make them manually inside of Excel. So if you don't want to do that, stay away from the black and white ones, and just go for the color lookup tables, all right? Okay, so I'm just letting you know that you don't want to do that. I spent hours and hours, and hours just blowing my mind. So back here, instead of a lookup table, it's a color lookup table, so I'm gonna click on Color Lookup Table, then I'm gonna go find the one that I made. And I'm not gonna use the one I made because I obviously don't want to use what I just made because it looked like, it was horrible. Let's see, Desktop, Profiles, and I'll just use this blue green dark one, and hit Load. So now I'm using that, and I made it as a ProPhoto RGB. And then here's where it gets a little tricky. Samples, 32 is good. Minimum zero, Amount 100, Max 200. What this is saying is that if they take, there's a slider, after you apply a profile you can either increase or decrease the effect of that slider, which you can't do on presets by the way. So profiles are like a really cool preset. If you take it and go to zero, it will be zero percent of the effect. 100% is in the middle, that's why this is in the middle. And then 200% is on the right, so if you slide it all the way right, you get double the effect. And you can change these numbers so that people can only apply 100% all the way to the right, 50%, zero percent, but it's always gonna start in the middle. So this is zero, 100, 200 is a good place to start. Okay, once you do that, you're gonna hit OK and now you have a test profile. You don't get to see what it looked like until you go to your actual image and start playing with it. But, if you want to then look at the profile, you just have to go back to Lightroom, here. Nope, not that Lightroom. Lightroom Classic, where are you Lightroom Classic? There you are. Okay you have to go back to Lightroom Classic, make sure that you quit, because remember in order for you to see a preset or a profile, you have to quit Lightroom and then restart. And once you restart Lightroom, which we'll do right now, then that profile is going to be available not only in Camera Raw, but also inside of Lightroom. So, when I look at this image, and go to my profile area, then I'm gonna go down here, and let's see. Profiles. Test Profile. See that? So it changed everything to these blue colors. So I really literally removed, in this particular lookup table, I said you can't have any warm colors, it's all blue. And so it completely removes the blue out of the, and then I can take this test amount, and I can either go to zero percent, or I can go to 200%. But chances are I'm gonna fall right in here. See, and I think that looks really nice. Because now it's like this cold effect, all right? So you can make your own profiles to go underneath and define the color that's coming in, and that's the major update that just happened inside of Lightroom. And the profiles are also available in Lightroom CC, but right now it's just the ones they've provided. So right now, Lightroom Classic is where you can actually create your profiles, inside of Camera Raw, and then they'll be available inside of Lightroom Classic, all right? So we've got a whole bunch of cool stuff. Most of it has to do with working with Sensei that's in Lightroom, but also we have that range mask that is fantastically useful, that's new to Lightroom in the last six months, basically 2018. Beautiful tool. And then, in April of 2018 is where you see the change where profiles become critically important to your workflow. So don't overlook the profile. That is going to change the way you look at your photos, and it makes so much sense to have that up front, and you can just pull in a profile, then you can start adding on top of it, and you can change the profile out from under all of the other settings, and play around with it and choose different ones, even after you finished the photo. And so, by the way, those profiles, this profile, if I attach this profile to this image, when it gets synchronized to the cloud and goes over to Lightroom Mobile, it will show up with this profile on it. So it will respect the profile, it just can't make the profile, if that makes sense to you. So, I know that's a little, a lot. I could have gone into a lot more depth and really blown you up, but we didn't have the time nor did I want to see like people falling on the floors. So, the key is that profiles are available. Use the ones that are already there. If you want to go buy some, go buy some. Mine are $20 for a big pack of them at jaredplatt.com. And there's free ones there, so by all means, everybody should go and download the free ones. And then you're gonna put them in by simply importing them, and there's an Import dialog box, it's very simple. Make sure that anytime you put new presets or profiles into Lightroom, use the Import option, because it's kind of complicated to get to the real place, as I showed you. So just use the Import option, which is basically when you go to the Develop, go to the Preset area here and import your presets, all right? Used to be you could drag them places. It's just getting too complicated, so just use the Import option and bring them in that way.