Monday, May 21, 2012

Lightroom Presets

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Filed under Post Production

When shooting weddings or other events where you are taking hundreds or thousands of images per shoot getting a streamlined post production process is key. Having a background in Fine Art I always want each image to have a very specific look and feel to it but at the same time can’t spend 5 minutes on each image. Using presets in Lightroom is key to getting an image 90% where I want it and then we do a little fine tuning. Being able to apply a preset to a group of images really saves time when doing our post production. When editing a shoot we first group together the images by how we want them to look (high contrast black and white, normal black and white, normal color, split tone, etc…). After the images are all sorted we have a preset for each type of look, we will apply the preset to the group and then go over each image one by one to do some fine tuning.

Here are some great, free lightroom presets we have found:

Albumen (1860′s Civil War era) Preset
lightroom presetslightroom presets

Albumen, a process used to create photos of this era seem to have very sharp clear centers, good dynamic range blurry/distorted edges often with vignetting. In looking at the old images from the American Civil War era it was learned that the surviving photos vary in coloration from yellow to gray, brown to almost purple in hue. Yellow seems to be most common so there is some freedom in crafting the coloration. Download here.

Muted Tone Sub-Pop Preset
free lightroom presetsfree lightroom presets
“Bleach bypass…is an optical effect which entails either the partial or complete skipping of the bleaching function during the processing of a film. By doing this, the silver is retained in the image along with the color dyes…The images usually would have reduced saturation and latitude, along with increased contrast and graininess.” Download here.

New York State of Mind Presets by Chad
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Chad says, “I developed these around the time I visited New York City for the first time, and for me, they work out amazing for street shots and candid people photos” Included in this set are three (3) presets. Download here.

Jack Davis Presets
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It’s a large preset collection that is organized in a tidy list. You can drag you mouse over the list and see the variation as they subtly change (low contrast to high contrast for example. Very well put together with lots of effects. Download here

TLC B&W Split Toning Collection
lightroom free presetsLightroom actions
There are 30 presets in the collection including solid colors, multi-tones, and classic chemical darkroom tones like platinum, palladium, selenium, etc. These well-designed presets will co-exist nicely with other presets, affecting only the split toning panel. Shown here are the Cooler Gray, Cyanotype and Silver Gelatin presets. Download here.

Also ifyou are looking for some great , free photoshop actions check out this list: Free Photoshop actions

About the author

Mark Stagi wrote 640 articles on this blog.

Mark is a fine art wedding and portrait photographer from Northern California. He has been passionate about photography since childhood and started his studio 12 years ago to bring a fresh style of photography to the wedding and portrait world.

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Comments

25 Responses to “Lightroom Presets”
  1. tracie says:

    the muted tone sub pop set doesn’t downoad! :(

  2. Mark says:

    Hi Tracie,

    The download link has been fixed for that one, thanks!
    Mark

  3. Saundra says:

    Love these Presets. Thanks!

  4. W. says:

    Hi,

    the Abby’s presets download link is broken, it works no more. Could you fix it please?

    Thanks,
    W.

  5. James says:

    The first preset link is not working anymore.

  6. Amanda says:

    Desperately been looking for a set of presets like the Abby one…but the link won’t work :-(

  7. Mark says:

    Thanks for letting me know, I am trying to track down the creator and get those back up here. In the meantime I took that preset down.

    Thanks
    Mark

  8. Headshots LA says:

    Great work! Thanks a lot, I love playing with presets.I love Lightroom!

  9. DaniLew says:

    Great collection of free LR presets! thank you!

    Danielle

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    This post was mentioned on Twitter by tengphotography: RT @digitalphotobuz: free lightroom presets: http://bit.ly/dfpkbv

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