Lightroom Presets

As a professional photographer, I spend nearly as much time editing images as I do in the field shooting them. My main photo editing tool is Adobe’s Lightroom.

Most of my editing is very straightforward, leaning heavily toward preserving editorial integrity. As a result, like hopefully many photographers representing themselves as journalists, I will be producing content that tells the truth.

History is full of pictures that lie. You only have to rewind one generation to find a photograph that was used both ways, as a true record of history, and as a manipulated, tainted fabrication: the Time vs Newsweek use of the police booking photograph of O.J. Simpson. One was right out of the police files, and the other was very obviously changed to create a prejudicial, unfair, compromised impression. I’ll leave it to you to look up the offending images; it only took me 10 seconds to find them side-by-side.

To that end, I have always been hesitant to over-edit my images. It is one thing to crop an image and clean it up with color balance, noise reduction, and sharpening, and entirely another to doctor an image to fool our readers. All photography is manipulation to some degree, but I don’t doctor images for our newspaper.

Personal photography remains more flexible, especially when I am trying to create moods, atmospheres, and memories. One interesting aspect of this kind of editing is the inclusion of dozens of presets that come with Adobe’s Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop, with the ability to buy and install thousands more. These presets can control any aspect of editing, from white balance and vignetting, to saturation and noise reduction.

Here is the original image of my wife with her Chihuahua Summer on a beautiful summer night in 2019.
Here is the original image of my wife with her Chihuahua Summer on a beautiful summer night in 2019.

Adobe users can also create their own presets, which is the way I’ve operated in the Adobe ecosystem since my first Photoshop experience in the mid-1990s.

Downloadable, installable presets are often bundled as specific packages, like night photography presets, landscape presets, or portraiture presets.

Between having COVID in January, and being cooped up for a few days here and there with inclement weather, I’ve had the opportunity to play with hundreds of these presets, and it’s been more fun than practical. I think for most of my photography, I’ll probably stick to creating my own presets, which I hope to expand in the coming months to include better color, noise, and sharpening settings.

If you get the chance to play around with Lightroom or Photoshop presets, by all means, give it a try. It’s fun!

Of course there are about a zillion black-and-white options in the presets.
Of course there are about a zillion black-and-white options in the presets.
This preset emphasized dynamic range of the image, somewhat bringing out the shadows and subduing the highlights.
This preset emphasized dynamic range of the image, somewhat bringing out the shadows and subduing the highlights.
This image was made with a downloaded “Orange and Teal” preset.
This image was made with a downloaded “Orange and Teal” preset.
This preset amped the contrast and desaturated the color; very interesting.
This preset amped the contrast and desaturated the color; very interesting.