I’m interested in hearing your thoughts about Lightroom’s presets. I’ve recently found them reasonably useful with my new Nikon camera; in the past I preferred the colours I got SOOC from my Fuji X cameras. I’ll note at this point that Fuji’s Acros sim with a tweak of the white balance and some grain remains my favourite black and white setting of all, but that’s beside the point.
I have been mainly toying with the new film-inspired presets, particularly the ‘Warm Gold’ (I think it’s called), Warm B&W, and Soft Ember presets and finding them reasonably pleasing for portraits. My next steps after applying them tend to involve tweaking the white balance, exposure, and reducing the grain effect to taste.
I have three questions:
1) Do you find any of the stock Lightroom presets useful as starting points?
2) Do other programmes have any presets you enjoy?
3) Have you tried the expensive preset packs available online? Are they worth it in your opinion? (I like some of the demo pictures they use to advertise their results but struggle to imagine that the presets are worth the cost.)
It depends......
As I have become better at post processing, I use them less and less than I did 20yrs ago.
They can be useful if you are lost in the weeds and need a starting point. They quickly can give you lots of different looks- and can get you up and going. Maybe spark your juices a little.
Some of the film emulations are interesting, but imho most of the "expensive preset packs" are not that useful. I tried several many years ago- they never really worked for my images. You can spend an hour wiggling sliders and come up with dozens of your own presets. I found the money was better spent actually learning the program in question- lightroom, dxo, capture one, etc- than buying quick fix presets.
Just my opinion, yours may vary
gary
I developed a couple several years back, but now only have one of them. Works for everything and I can do adjustments from the base if needed. It is the only one I use.
I don't use their stock presets, nor have I ever found them particularly useful.
I use the hell out of camera matching profiles, though, and I make my own presets all the time by camera/lens combination. Preset packs are largely a waste of money because they were created on a totally different set of hardware than yours.
Tried them, and even bought a couple of preset packs, but they never compared to a properly exposed and composed shot. A few years ago, it was all you saw on social media - all the faded, color washed shots on IG, FB and Flickr, but it got old fast. Nothing wrong with trying them if you have certain look you are after, but I would advise against buying the packs and just fine tune the ones you get for free if that's the route you want to go.
You mention your Nikon camera, have you considered Nikon's NX Studio as an alternative to post processing?
It has lots of processing functionality and TBH it will render your NEF's far better than Lightroom as it accesses proprietary data that Adobe attempts to interpolate. You can also create custom profiles and upload them to your camera as presets while you shoot. It's free give it a try.
