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Making Presets

one of the great things about light room in general. Both light room, classic light room desktop. The new version of light room, light room Web, even light room on your phone is that it is all about getting things done quickly and part of getting things done quickly and accurately and consistently is having presets and profiles. So we're going to talk about the difference between presets and profiles and what they are and how to make them and how to import them how to use them. So the first thing you need to understand that there are two different types of automatic, uh, things that work on your photos, presets and profiles A preset is over on the left hand side. So on the left hand side of light room, there's a panel and it's called presets. Hold on. We got to be in the develop module. So in the develop module, when you are looking at and we're gonna we're gonna be looking at this photo because I want you to see the colors on this color checker as we're doing it. So that's just ah, co...

lor checker, a passport, which is a great way to make sure that all your colors air, right? We're going to see those shift as we use presets and profiles. But over on the left hand side, there are presets. So there's a preset panel and their, uh, presets that come with light room. And then they're presets that you can add toe light room so the ones up above are the ones that light room ships with, and most of them are not all that great, but, um, the ones that you can buy or download or you can save your own. Oftentimes, they're really, really quite good. Um, so that's what I've got here. These JP grain collections and black and white color and corrections air there. And I have one more that we're gonna add in a minute so that you can see how toe add them. But these are your presets, and a preset is basically image sliders. So if I click on a preset, so let's just say I'm going to do a black and white preset as I shift through them. A lot of this is going to be based on a tone curve right here. And so let's just click on here, and I want you to see this tone curve shift. So let me just do the RGB. Okay, so watch this tone curve as I click on this thin negative, you see what happened there. All it did has just changed slider positions. It changed the curve, and it just it's just taking things in wherever their positions are on the right hand side in the developed panels and it's moving them. That's what a preset does. So a preset is simply an automated way of sliding sliders at one time with one click. And the way that you create one of those is that you do something to an image over here. Like, for instance, let's say that I turned this to black and white and I change the texture up. And I played with the tone curve and made it fairly, um, contrast you like this. That could be a preset, and so I would come over to the left hand side and click on the preset plus button, which is right here next to the preset panel. It says plus, and I would create a preset when I create the preset. Then I'm going to look to the things that I did to the image. Now the first thing you have to do is check none so that none of those boxes air checked because you got to know what it is you did to the image to make it what it is. So we're going to look, and first thing we did is we gave it black and white. So it's a black and white treatment. Um, and then we know we didn't use black and white mix at all. Ah, but we did use the tone curve. So the tone curve is a pretty interval part of this look. So we used the tone curve we used black and white, and then we also used our texture slider, and so that kind of made it pop. But quite frankly, I think the adding texture to a black and white photo is that's not a It's not a good preset because you're actually combining two different things in tow. One preset. You're better off having a preset for how much texture you want in a photo. And how like, uh, gritty, you want it and stuff like that, and then you want another one for black and white and the contrast levels. And so I'm not gonna add texture to that, even though in this particular photo I added texture. So I'm just doing white balance and tone curve and then I need to name it and I can name it something clever. I can name it something useful. The more clever you get with your name, the more use less it is. So generally speaking, I like to name mine with a very specific. So I could just say high contrast black and white. Ah, that's a high contrast, Black and white. That's it, uh, with tone curve there. So that's pretty descriptive of what it's going to dio. And then I can organize it by putting it in any of my specific groups. But I'm going to just leave it in the user preset group. That's what I'm gonna do with it. And once I've got that, I just hit create. And now when I go to the user presets down here, you can see that I have a high contrast black and white tone curve. Okay, so then any time I want to use that, I could go to another image. Just click on that high contrast, black and white tone curve. And interestingly enough, it did not apply the black and white. And I think I know why. Um and so let's go and figure that out. So we're gonna go to the basic and we're gonna apply black and White. Now it's gonna work. Now let's go back and right Click High contrast Black and White Tone Curve And we're gonna update with the current settings and it's gonna ask me what those settings need to be, and I need to go in. See, I did white balance, which is the wrong thing. I I thought it was saying white, white and black and white, I saw was white and black. It's treatment and profiles what I meant to put in there. So now I'm gonna go back out and update it. And now, if I go to any other image and I click on that black and white, it does it. So just be careful what you're clicking. But it's also good to know that when you are, um, when you're making a preset, if you mess up, you can always go back and right click it and you can update with the current settings like we just did so and then if I ever want to add some other effect to it, like the sharpness or whatever, I can always go into another set of presets, and I can say, OK, I want to add sharpness to this. So I'm just going to come down and look for a ah, a sharpening option, which is right. They're sharpening. So I just added a little sharpening to it, but that was independent of the black and white itself. So it's better toe make your presets kind of separated so that you're doing one thing. So turn it to black and white, get the black and white look you like, and then have another one that sharpens things and then have another one that does the tones, the color ization that you want for the like, say, the split toning. That way you just click, click, click and get it done as opposed to. You would have to have 1000 generations to be able to, uh, adequately cover all of the different variations you could have from those three different types of settings because you might have five black and whites and, um I have five different sharp innings and you might have five different, uh, split tones. And so you multiply all that together and it's hundreds of of options to try and get each permutation instead. If you just have three different settings, I want this black and white. I want this Ah, colorization. I want that amount of sharpening its just three clicks and you're done. So I highly suggest that that's way you develop your presets so we've made presets. But now the question is, how do you manage presets? So I'm actually going to undo the adjustments that we've made on these images. There we go. So we're back to normal. And what we want to dio is who want to figure out how to manage those presets. So presets are managed in one very specific place. So if I want to manage those presets again, I would just go here. And by the way, I really dislike having a whole bunch of these presets over here so I can click on this plus button and I can manage the presets. And when I managed the presets, I get to choose to turn off all of the ones that I don't use. There we go. So now these air, all my presets and none of these adobe presets and I hit save Boom. Now I have a much more manageable preset line, very easy to navigate, very easy to final of my presets because it was very easy to manage them and turn them off. So if you're not using a set of presets, get rid of them by just turning them off so that you're not to look at him. OK, now, where are these presets? Where do you actually import them? There are two ways to import presets. The first way to import presets is simply by clicking on the plus button and clicking on import presets. And it asks you where those presets that you want to import are. That's the first way to do. It's very easy to do it that way, and it's better to do it that way because right now, light room can actually use two different types of presets, the old style of preset and the new style of presets. So the old style of preset had a dot LR template at the end of it. So at the end of the name, there was a dot LR template. That's the file type. Now, the newer version of presets is a dot ex MP. So X and P is the new preset, uh, file type so it can actually use both of them. But if you just take these new LR templates and put them into the system the second way, it won't see him because it has to be converted. So what we're gonna do is we're going to ask light room to convert these presets. The way we do that is simply go in and click on the plus and import presets. And no matter what kind of presets I ask for, it's going to automatically convert them to the correct type of preset. So I'm going to go in, choose an entire folder, so I just choose that folder of presets. And then I'm just gonna highlight all of these presets here, and I'm going to click import. There we go. So light room now is going to import those presets, but it has to convert them to the new ex MP style of preset. Great. So now I'm gonna have to close down light room as soon as soon as we're done, I'm gonna close down light room and and reset light room so that we have the ability to bring them in. So once you have imported, just quit light room and then open it back up. So if you if you can't find a preset that you've imported, just restart light room and then you'll find that inside of the user presets, you can see all the presets that I've just loaded up. So there's all of those presets ready to go Now you can move presets just by simply right clicking a preset any any preset Doesn't matter which. And then you can, uh, just rename it. You can remove. You can move it. So if I click move, it's going to give me an opportunity to not only move it to a specific folder, but I can also create a new group, and I can call that. Let's just call it new presets and I'm gonna create And okay, so now I have a folder called New Presets with that one folder in it, and the beauty is that I can grab a Siris of these. I can grab any of these and just drag them into the new presets folder. So any any preset that I like, I can put their. And I highly suggest that you utilize folders too kind of organizer presets so that you're not because you don't need this many presets cycling through all these presets. It's cool because you got all these different options that you can go through. But you don't need that many. If you're never gonna use them, don't have them there. You'd rather have, like, you know, five or 10 of the same one of presets rather than 100. So find the ones you like the most and save those either into a folder or if you really like a specific one like say, you love this black and white right click the black and white and ah, you want to move that one so you can drive. Just drag it into your into your ah dragon like this into the new presets and that one, maybe your absolute favorite. So add it to your favorites. And now there's gonna be a little pulled a right up here at the very top of presets that says favorites. So anything that you really, really like throat in the favorites, but notice that it's also still down in that folder that you just created. So there are two ways to organize your preset while there's three. Actually, the first way is to turn off the folders that you don't want. The second is to organize your folders into specific are your presets into specific folders. And then the third way is to add a favorite tag so that they stay up in the favorites so that you should probably maybe have 10 or 15 or 20 of your favorites. And that should be your go to styles that you want to click on really quickly. Okay, so that is how you import things into presets, and that's how you create presets.