With Lightroom being an advanced industry standard for photo editing, the program can seem pretty daunting at first. But, Adobe considered a way to help photographers save their editing settings and share them with the world; with presets!
Presets are editing templates that can be applied to any photograph, changing the image’s style, colors, lighting, and other characteristics with the touch of a button. This can make a blaise photograph look spruced up and exciting or a professional photographer keep the style consistent. Although there are plenty of free presets on the market, investing in several good ones is of great use to any image maker.
If the above few sentences didn’t sell you on the idea of presets, maybe our list of 10 reasons to use Lightroom presets can!
10 Reasons Why Lightroom Presets are Helpful
There are many reasons as to why Lightroom Presets are quite helpful. Here are our top ten validations for adding Lightroom presets!
1. Excellent Learning Tool!
If you’re new to the editing world, there is no need to dismay. Lightroom Presets are an excellent way to learn more about the program, the sliders, and the various tools available to you.
You can study the specific slider placements in the Lightroom preset(s) you have and begin to figure out why they were placed there. By making adjustments back and forth, it becomes clear what slider impacts what aspect of the image.
This knowledge can then be applied to your future edits, giving you a great insight on how the Lightroom application works.
2. Helpful Side-By-Side Comparisons
It helps to be able to see how an image changes based on the edits applied to it. With Adobe Lightroom, you can switch your view (in the Develop window) to Split Mode and compare the original image with its edit. This helps you see exactly where you started and how you ended up when you apply a Lightroom preset.
3. A Good Foundation for Your Photography
Every photographer wants to have a distinct voice in the world, but it can be hard to find that style on your own. Using different Lightroom presets can build a good structure for your photography, creating the base layer that you then build upon.
Since Lightroom presets are able to be tweaked tremendously, you can apply them as a foundation and then proceed to do additional adjustments.
4. Keeps Your Style Consistent
Whether photography is your job, your hobby, or just a way to spruce up your social media feed; using presets helps keep your style consistent. We humans naturally gravitate towards cohesiveness, and being tailored equals a pleasing aesthetic.
Having unity in your work not only pushes your photography further, but it can also draw a lot of attention to your work (thanks to the beautiful images!).A consistent style has also been shown to greatly aid in acquiring new clients or followers who are drawn to the style you are showcasing.
Even if the presets don’t fit all of your images as perfect as a glove, you can do little tweaks here and there to make the preset work.
5. Helps Get Your Inspiration Flowing
Sometimes we take a photograph that we love on the camera but that affection dwindles a bit when it hits the computer screen. Sometimes we have a great idea that then fades away once the image is taken. What is a photographer to do?
Use presets to try out different looks! You can run through your exquisite library of presets and see what brings life back into your photograph.
6. An Affordable Way to Edit
If cost is of the essence, then Lightroom presets can be a very budget-friendly way to edit. With all of the benefits a preset provides, most assume that they must be expensive to purchase. Certainly not the case! Presets are very affordable.
Equally so, there is no need to hire a professional retoucher when the Lightroom presets on the market can help put the finishing touches on your photographs.
7. Speed Is the Name of the Game!
As they say, time is money! Whether photography is a profitable endeavor for you or not, the last thing you want is to live life behind a computer screen. Using presets can help speed up your workflow, ensuring that photoshoots get edited faster than ever before. With a single click, an image can be fully edited.
8. Presets + Batch Editing = Mind Blowing Lifesaver
Speaking of speed; presets can be combined with one of the most amazing features of Adobe Lightroom: batch editing!
Batch editing is when you apply the same edits to a grouping of images. This is the secret many professional photographers indulge in- they edit one image to their style and then apply that setting to all of the photographs they took. This system is automated, so you don’t need to do anything other than watch it go!
With Lightroom presets, you can apply to preset to as many photographs as you want- at once.
9. Fosters an Artistic Community
Art is as much a community as it is an individual endeavor. By sharing or offering presets with the world, a beautiful artistic community is born.
Photographers all over the world can share their workflows, individual ideas, and favorite colors with fellow picture-takers, bouncing ideas and inspiring one another endlessly.
10. Presets are Not Filters
Although these two are often confused, presets are not filters- and that’s a big reason why you should be using presets!
Filters apply a universal effect on top of an image, regardless of the image’s structure. Filters cannot be adjusted, so they will never look right on every photograph. As such, you won’t find real consistency there.
Presets, on the other hand, apply global adjustments and are fully customizable. You can adapt any preset to any photograph and make it look good!
In conclusion, presets have a large variety of benefits to them. From helping a photographer realize their style to aiding someone in making their existing photographs look better, presets are there to provide ease for editing. Whatever your reason for using Lightroom presets- click that Preset button with pride and watch the magic happen!