Lessons

Lesson Info

Presets and Profiles

now, you've already seen me make a couple of presets, but I want to go over the process of creating a preset one more time because making presets and profiles is something that will save you a lot of time and actually make your work very consistent. So in order to discuss making a preset, we're going to have to make some kind of an effect that we like. So I'm going to come in and I'm gonna do a color grading effect, so I'm going to go into my shadows and I'm going to brighten up my shadows just a little bit, see how they're getting a little bit thin. And I'm also going to play with the shadows and create some kind of a color in the shadows. So I like that kind of a cyan and then I'm gonna hold the shift key down so that I don't mess with the color and then I just kind of play with the amount of saturation that looks pretty good. Now, I'm going to go into the mid tones and the mid tones, I'm going to bring those down or up down or up, I think maybe up just a little bit and I'm also goin...

g to play around with the toe. I like that. So I like the idea of a little bit of warmth in the mid tone. So I'm just adding, I think I actually wanted to be a little more orange though, so I'm making this orange and then I'm going to kind of scale it up and down until I like there, I like that and now let's brighten this up just a little bit more and then I'm gonna take the highlight and the highlight. I think we're gonna I think we'll keep it down a little bit, so it's just a little bit muted and we'll take this and play around with it and see what works for this as well. So I think maybe right there and start at zero and pull it up just a little bit, that looks pretty nice. Okay, so now we have our color grading, so I like what I've done with the color grading now I'm going to go into the basic effects and I'm going to double click vibrance, we're going to get rid of all that vibrance And I'm actually gonna take saturation down to about 20 I guess. So I like the fact that we have very little saturation in there and now I'm going to go into the tone curve and I'm going to go into the full tone curve with the actual sliders. So I'm going to that first curvy looking circle and I'm going to play around with the shadows, darks and lights because it's it's fairly easy and it's just going to add a little bit of richness to this photograph. So I'm going to go in and grab the dark and just pull dark down, just a little bit um black, I think I'm gonna leave right where it is and highlights. I'm going to bring down and lights, I'm going to bring up and so I can test what I've done by clicking on this little toggle button and you can see that I've just rich ended up just a little bit and I like that and then I'm going to go to the individual colors so I'm going to read and with red, I'm just going to grab the point at the very top and I'm just going to drag it this way or this way I'm playing around and see, okay, I like it a little bit warmer in the highlights and I'm going to go for a little bit greener in the shadows and then I'm going to do the same thing with green. I'm going to play around with what it's gonna look like in the highlights versus you know what, let's leave green alone because green is problematic color most of the time. Blue, let's play with blue. I like it warmer. Actually let's leave it exactly the way it is at the top and we're gonna add a little bit more blue, they're like that. Now let's see what we did. That's pretty good. I like that. Okay, so now that we've finished that it's a pretty interesting effect. It's got a little bit of tone curve going on and a little bit of color grading going on. So that's our two effects now. What we're going to do is go over to the preset area and hit the plus button. Now we've already done this and I've already shown you this process but I'm going to explain the logic behind it. So now we're going to hit create a preset and we're going to name it. And in this case we're just going to name this a blue um warm cross process. So blue that says war worm Warm, Okay, so it's a blue warm cross process and now we're going to check none. And the reason we're checking none is because we want to make sure that we only put in things that are necessary for this particular effect. So for instance color grading was used, so we're going to use that but we're not going to use any of the masks because those are not part of the effect. We're not gonna add any of the white balance or shadows or highlights or anything like that because that was specific to this image. But we are going to add the tone curve. So tone curve and color grading are the two things that we're going to add to this effect. So blue warm cross process and we're going to hit create. So I just created a cross process. So now if I'm looking at any image and I click on that blue Warm cross process, look at that, it just makes a beautiful image and all it did was the adjustments here didn't change and what it did is it added a tone curve and it added a color grading area and it made that, oh you know what else? The one thing we forgot you should have reminded me. But the one thing that we forgot Is this is a rich one. So let's right click this and rename it and we'll call it rich blue warm process. Okay? And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to this one, the one that we have initially made, and we're going to go back and make a new one, a new preset, create that preset. And we're going to add to it saturation because we made negative saturation and we also made vibrance at zero. So let's keep that in there too. So vibrance is at zero saturation is negative 20 I think. And so its color grading tone curve saturation and vibrance because we wanted to mute those colors. We're going to call this d sat curated blue warm across process. Alright, so we've got the d saturated blue warm cross process and now we're going to make sure that we have color grading vibrant saturation tone curve. Yes, good. And create so now we have two versions. So let's go back to this one and now if we use the D saturated version, you can see that it's quite a bit different. So here's let's just go to the history, Here's the saturated one and here's the less saturated, saturated, less saturated. I like the less saturated. So that's really great, these presets just like the profiles I talked about can also be managed. So if you click on manage presets you can choose what presets show and what presets don't show. So I can click on these to add more presets that come with light room or I can remove them so that I'm only looking at the presets that I use on a regular basis. You also have the ability when you're creating a preset to go to the group. So under the preset name is a group, click on user presets and you can create a new group. Let's just call these cl dash platt dash presets And that's what I'm going to give to you is a bunch of presets inside this group and I'll add some extra ones so we'll we'll put in like 10 presets in there. So you're gonna have some cool presets to download and then I'm gonna show you how to import those presets. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna create. So now you have a folder that you can put items into. Once I've done that I'm just going to hit create so that it creates the preset. So now I have a group called Cl Creativelive Platt presets and I can grab all of these user presets and just drag them into that group. So as I go like this, I'm dragging these into that Platt group. There we go. So I've got a bunch of process now I can right click this untitled one and just delete it, get rid of it. There we go. So now I have a group of presets and again if I go up to this plus button and I manage them you'll see that those presets, the cl platt presets are available but I can turn them off whenever I want. Now once you have a set of presets you can always right click those presets and you can go to export that group. So if you export the group it'll ask you where you want to save it. We're just gonna save it on the desktop and hit save and it's going to save that out as a set of presets that you can share with anyone else or you can go to your other machine that has like Ramona and you can import those presets. So now if you want to import presets you would go to the presets area and click on the plus button and say import presets. So you click on those presets, simply go to this zip folder that was created on your desktop and click import when you do that. You will end up with this folder with all these presets in it. It's that simple. Very easy. Now let's talk a little bit about profiles because those profiles are also a lot like presets but different in a way. So presets. Change sliders. So as I work on these presets over here whenever I click on one. So if I click on this color? Gray, blue shadow. Warm highlight it changes settings over here, it changes the tone curve, it changes the color grading. If I click on another one it changes those settings, see how the saturation came down, the vibrance came down. So it changes any setting that you clicked in. That when you were creating it in that little checklist, that's very different than a profile. If you look at my slider settings here, when I go to the profile settings and I choose say this black and white documentary classic look and then I go and close that the slider settings are exactly the same. Nothing changed. And that's because like we talked about at the beginning, those profiles are underlying color definitions so they're underneath the photograph itself. So before you ever see the image in Lightroom, this color definition is being applied to the image and then it's being shown to you. And so a profile is a it's basically like a preset that doesn't slide any sliders. It's kind of a magic preset and it allows you to take that preset and slide back and forth to increase or decrease the effect of that preset. And so I love a profile because it has the ability not only to apply a style to the photograph that doesn't change the sliders, but I also have this amount slider which is really helpful in order to kind of subtly change that look. So the question is, how do you import them? Well you do exactly the same thing. Instead of going over to the preset area and clicking on plus import presets, you just simply go over to the profile browser. These four squares click on that and then right at the top profile browser is a plus button, click on the plus import profiles and then go look for profiles. So if I click on this folder, you can see there's a bunch of ex mp files here. These are all profiles. I simply highlight the entire list of profiles and import and that's how they come in. Now listen up and I will show you how to create a profile. It is not impossible. It's actually not that hard to do, but it does require a few steps. So I'm gonna walk you through the steps right now. So if you look at this image, let's say that this is the image that we want to make into a profile. So we want to create a profile that looks like this. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to go to the grid in the grid, we're gonna highlight the image that we want to create a profile from. And we're gonna go to the metadata menu and hit save metadata to files. What that's gonna do is it's going to either save it into the D N. G. Which this is a DMG digital negative. So we're actually forcing the metadata or the changes that we made into the D. N. G. Or if it's a regular raw file it will create an X. M. P. Side card file. Either way, it's basically putting the information about what you did in Lightroom into the folder with the image or into the image itself. Either way it doesn't matter once we're done with that, we're going to right click it and we're gonna tell it to show us that image in the finder when I do that. It's going to open up that image. You can see it's a DMG the settings don't show at the system level but they're there and then I'm gonna right click this image and I'm gonna go and say open with Photoshop. So I'm opening it with Photoshop 2022. When I open it with Photoshop it's going to immediately bring me into camera raw. So you can see that I'm in camera raw and camera raw looks a lot like um Lightroom except it's a slight style change on the hist a gram slight style change in the way that it presents itself but it's pretty much the same as Lightroom and once we're in here we can go to the preset area. So this is these two little circles here and if I click on that preset area, it opens up a bunch of presets now notice that the cl platt presets that I put into Lightroom happen to be right here, see that. So I've got my presets, all ready to go. So they are shared with camera raw through Lightroom. So I have my adjustments here and I want to make a profile. Now if you're in the preset area and you click on this little new document, looking icon, you click on it and it opens up a create a preset option but we don't want to do that, we don't want a preset, we wanna profile. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to hold the option key down and I'm gonna click on that little new document button again and when I do that it opens up a create a profile option. So I'm going to call this bw blue and white. So it's a it's it's not really white though. It's black and white, blue and sepia. Alright, so it is black, black and white, blue and sepia, that's the name of the profile and we can choose the group that we wanted to go in. We're going to call a new group because remember we have a group of creative live presets so we're going to call this cl dash platt dash profiles and hit OK, so I've just created a group that it's gonna go into. This is how we start segmenting things and then I get to choose what's going to go into it. So take a look at all these and decide what it is that matters in this photograph, the basic adjustments don't matter the parametric curve does the point curve does the black and white mix does the color grading does, but the masking does not. So we don't, we didn't do anything with masking that was important and notice that it says treatment is always included. That means black and white versus color. That's, that's always part of a profile. So we've named it, we've put it in a group and then we've chosen what aspects we want to include in the creation of this profile. And so all of those things are going to be utilized to determine what it is. The profile is going to look like. Then we go down to the advanced settings and it says tone map strength, low is normal. Just keep it at low. Don't ask me why. Just do it. If you do anything higher, it will start to look weird. Also you can use a look up table if you know how to make look up tables. If you don't skip, don't even worry about it. If you do practice playing with look up tables because you can create a look up table in Photoshop or other programs and then use that look up table to alter the colors in the look up table section. If you know how to use look up tables and know how to make them. You can actually use a look up table to create the color effect that you want to create. And the way that you do that is just simply click on the look up table option and go find the look up table that you have once you've done that, then it's going to show right here. And then you get to choose between these options, minimum amount and maximum. If you choose a minimum of 0% and a maximum of of say 100% and then amount of 50, that little slider that allows you to change how much that Profile is in play will start at 50, Go as low as 0% and as high as 100%. If you put that at 0%,, Minimum zero amount at 100 And max at 200, then it will start at 100, you will have 100% below And 100% more of that same profile. So that's the look up table option. If you're not using look up tables or you don't know how to This is the easiest way to create a profile. It's not as pristine and as good all of my profiles are made with look up tables. But this profile is being made without one. You don't have to make your profile with a look up table. It is better to make one with a look up table. But then you have to learn a lot of information and you have to really practice doing it because it's quite complicated. But this the way we're doing it right now is a very easy way to make profiles so go ahead and practice doing it this way. Um And then later on you could start playing with look up tables. Once we're done with all of this, we're going to click ok if you go back into Lightroom, Classic and try and look for that profile, you are going to be disappointed because it's not there. So you have to quit light room. Once I've restarted Lightroom I can go back to the profile browser and you will find that there's a new set of profiles, they're called cl platt profiles. If I drop that down there it is and there's my option now keep in mind that this already has some settings on it. So then if I add a profile, remember I'm adding that profile on top of a profile so that doesn't work so well. Um So what I want to do is go to another image and if I click on that image there, see that that's what it's gonna look like and it's perfect click on that and it hasn't changed any of my settings. All of my settings are exactly the same. Even my color grading options are just back to neutral. Everything is exactly the way I had it before I turned this profile on and I can go to the profile and I can decrease and increase, see that. So I can go to just pure black and white or I can go kind of part way in between or I can go over the top. So this is a beautiful way to make profiles. You'll have a lot of fun and it'll give you a lot of options in the way that you deal with your photographs. I love profiles because I can work on an image and then later come to that image and change the profile and it will give me a completely different look to that image. So I can simply just come in and say, oh I want a different look. So I'm gonna do this look there and now I can scale it back or increase it. That looks great. Close it and it didn't change any of the exposure, any of the burning and dodging and retouching or anything like that because it's not a preset, it's a profile. So we're going to give you a set of profiles and a set of presets and I want you to practice importing them and then once you've used them, I want you to practice making your own profiles and presets because there are a lot of fun to make and they're very useful