2 years ago I became blessed with an increase in photographic work that included high school senior portraits, family portraits and weddings. With the increase in photography work, alongside my typical web and graphic work I found myself in a need to streamline my workflow and editing process.
I went to my trusty friend, Google, and began looking for first free presets to apply someone else’s style to my photos and was never happy with the results on my images. Then I moved up to trying a few paid presets, again someone else’s style with not so satisfy results. Then I found SLR Lounge v4 in the summer of 2012 (then upgraded in 2013); fell in love and haven’t parted since.
What I love about the Lightroom Preset System is that it’s not about apply someone else’s style to your photos, it’s about fine tuning and creating your own style easily, per photo, per shoot.
Much like what Pye, from SLR Lounge teaches in the Natural Light Couples Photography Workshop, it begins with a foundation and then the artistic creativity comes out of that. The workflow of the Lightroom Preset System starts with foundation or “Base”. Making edits to the tonality of an image by way of Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. From there you modify image contrast, fade and color by selecting from the “Curves” which they have organized by color schemes. At this point you can stop or make further adjustments or add special effects.
One of things I like about this system is that it’s Lightroom Presets and not Photoshop Actions. With Photoshop Actions you really don’t know how a photo will turn out until you run the action and wait for a result. With these Lightroom Presets, you can see how each preset will affect you photo just by rollover the preset and keeping your eye on the Navigator preview panel (or you can just click and see the change instantly).
The Lightroom Preset System has drastically cut down my editing time while keeping my photos looking consistent and personalized.
The Lightroom Preset System v5.1 by SLR Lounge is a revamped upgrade from version 5. With v5.1, SLR Lounge added 95 new presets to their rather robust preset system. With 311 total presets including 278 Develop Presets, 30 Brush Presets and our 3 most Common Image Export Presets SLR Lounge revamped all of the existing Lightroom Presets to improve image tonality and quality while keeping compatibility with Lightroom versions all the way back to LR4.
The Lightroom Preset System is the “Gold Standard in Lightroom Image Processing.”