Above: First, let’s take a look at how applying a preset affects your settings (seeing this will help us understand the how and why of applying multiple presets – this will make more sense in just a minute). This is how the Basic panel looks before applying any preset — all the sliders are set at their default zero setting.

Above: Here’s how the Basic panel looks after I applied the Soft Mist preset that comes with Lightroom. Notice how all but two of the Tone and Presence section sliders have moved. Remember, Presets simply move the sliders for you to preset positions, so that’s what you’re seeing above.

If I click on another preset (which I did here) it messes up the look of the first preset entirely because it changed the setting of six sliders: the Whites, Blacks, Clarity, Texture, Vibrance, and Saturation sliders. Applying the 2nd preset totally changed the look I applied in my first preset. It doesn’t “add” it on top of what the first preset it. It overwrites it – unless the preset I applied didn’t change any of those sliders that got moved when you applied the first preset.

Q. So, what type of Preset could I have applied that wouldn’t have destroyed my first preset?

A. One that doesn’t move any of those sliders that the first preset moved. So, you could have applied a 2nd preset that didn’t mess with the first preset’s sliders at all if the 2nd preset only adjusted things the first didn’t, in this case, like the Exposure, Temp or Tint. Or you could apply a preset that uses features found in different panels that hadn’t been used in the first preset. So, you could apply a preset that just adjusted the Tone Curve, or added Sharpening or a Vignette, etc., and applying a preset with just any of those wouldn’t move those Basic panel sliders that were applied from the first preset.

For example, look at the basic panel above — I applied the first preset, and then I applied a 2nd preset but it only had a Tone Curve adjustment, sharpening, an HSL/Color adjustment, and a vignette, none of which were in the first preset, so my Basic panel looks exactly the same as it did when I applied the first preset — adding those other things didn’t mess up the settings from my first preset, which only had Basic panel adjustments.

That’s why we say, “Maybe.” As long as the 2nd preset you apply doesn’t use the same sliders (or features) that were in the first preset, then yes, you can stack presets without it destroying the look of the first preset you applied, but in reality, that happens pretty rarely with presets. Most of the time when you apply a 2nd preset, it has enough sliders moved within it that it trashes the first look, but at least know you know why.

Have a great weekend, everybody! #GoBucs!

-Scott

The post Why You Usually Can’t Apply More Than One Lightroom Preset appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

First, a quick heads up: I’m super psyched to be teaching four sessions in person up in New York City next month at B&H Photo’s awesome “Depth of Field Conference” (the Pro Portrait, Wedding, and Event Photography Conference). You can attend in person in NYC or watch the conference online – either way – it’s free (thanks to the folks at B&H and a host of industry-leading sponsors). Here’s the link to RSVP and for more details. Can’t wait! OK, on to today’s tip.

I question I get pretty often about using Presets is whether you can apply multiple presets to an image. The short answer is “Maybe, but probably not.” Here’s why (and when you actually can):

Above: here’s the Basic panel before applying a preset, so all the sliders are set at their default zero setting.

Above: Here’s the same panel after I applied a preset. Remember, Presets simply move the sliders for you to preset positions, so that’s what you’re seeing above.

Above: If I go and apply another preset (which I did here above) it entirely messes up the look I got with the first preset because it moved the Exposure slider, the Contrast slider, the Highlights and Shadows slider, the Blacks slider, and both the Clarity and Dehaze sliders. So, applying the 2nd preset totally changed the look I applied in my first preset. It doesn’t “add” it on top of what the first preset it. It overwrites it.

So, when can you apply a 2nd preset without it messing up the first one you applied? You have to use a preset that doesn’t move any of the sliders that got adjusted in the first preset. So, you could apply a preset that adjusts the Vibrance, Saturation, or White Balance sliders, because none of those were adjusted in the first preset. Or you could apply a preset that uses features found in different panels that hadn’t been used in the first preset, like one that’s adjusts just the Tone Curve or adds Sharpening or a Vignette, etc.. Any one of those wouldn’t move those Basic panel sliders that were applied from the first preset.

For example, look at the basic panel above. I applied the first preset and then a 2nd preset, but it only had a Tone Curve adjustment, sharpening, an HSL/Color adjustment, and a vignette, none of which were in the first preset, so my Basic panel looks exactly the same as it did when I applied the first preset — adding those other things didn’t mess up the settings from my first preset, which only had Basic panel adjustments.

That’s why we say, “Maybe, but probably not.” While it’s possible to apply a 2nd preset with settings you didn’t use in the first preset, that’s not usually the case (again, as less it’s just sharpening or a vignette or a tone curve – something like that). Then yes, you can stack presets without it destroying the look of the first preset you applied, but in reality, that happens pretty rarely with presets.

Hope you found that helpful., and here’s wishing you a great Monday!

-Scott

The post Why You Usually Can’t Apply More Than One Preset appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

What Are Local Adjustment Presets?

In LrC, if you select any of the three local adjustment tools — Adjustment Brush, Graduated Filter, or Radial Filter — you will find they share the same panel of adjustment options, and the ability to save a given configuration of adjustments as a preset.

ACR has this same functionality, but it doesn’t come with a set of default local adjustment presets like LrC does, and so, you need to create all of your own presets.

The Transfer Station

My assumption here on Lightroom Killer Tips is that if you are reading this, you are a person who primarily uses LrC or Lr, like me. As such, like me, you have have been creating or installing local adjustment presets for years, and you might like to have them accessible in ACR.

LrC still saves local adjustment presets in a .lrtemplate file format, which ACR does not use. So, the simplest way I found to transfer the settings in a given local adjustment preset from LrC to ACR is to apply them to a photo, then open that photo in ACR, and create the preset from the existing settings. Here’s how it works.

Step One: Starting in LrC, select a raw photo (just to make this easier), and preferably one that doesn’t have any other settings, and to really make it easy on yourself, one that makes it easy to see where the local adjustment pins are located. I picked one that had a lot of open blue sky.

Step Two: Grab the Adjustment Brush, and single-click somewhere at the top of the photo, then select the local adjustment preset you want to transfer to ACR.

Step Three: Press Enter/Return, to create a new adjustment, and single-click just below that first pin, then apply a different local adjustment preset.

You may be detecting a pattern here. Sure, you could do this one adjustment at a time, but I think this speeds up the process a little. Just be sure to press Enter/Return so that you create a new pin each time, as each pin is where the local adjustment preset will be applied. I did this 7 times, but you can do it as many as you like.

Step Four: With all of the separate pins with different presets for each applied, press CMD/Ctrl+S to have LrC write its adjustments to XMP. You may see a prompt asking if you want to do this, and if so, click Continue.

Step Five: Right-click the photo and choose Show in Finder/Explorer (or press CMD/Ctrl+R) to open your file browser to that photo. Then, since you started with a raw file, double-click the photo to open it in ACR (which is most likely the default program for raw files, but if it is not, open that photo in Photoshop to see it open in ACR).

Step Six: In ACR, select the Adjustment Brush, then click the first pin to enable that adjustment. You will see the associated settings of that pin appear in the adjustment brush panel.

Step Seven: Click the three-dot (…) menu at the top of the Brush panel, and choose New Local Correction Preset… from the menu.

Step Eight: Enter the name for that preset in the resulting dialog box (I just switched back and forth between LrC and ACR to see the names and keep them the same).

Repeat that process for each pin you applied to the original photo in LrC, until you’ve transferred over all of the settings for each pin. Each time you click a pin you’ll see the settings associated with it, and that’s what you use to create the new local correction preset each time.

Once I finished that first batch of 7 presets, I canceled out of ACR and switched back to LrC. Then, starting with the top pin, I applied a new presets to each pin on that photo, saved changes to XMP, and repeated the process until all of my presets were in ACR.

Is There a Better Way?

If there is, I’d love to hear it, but this was the best I could find. It is not likely something most people will need to do often, so after maybe 10 minutes of time invested I had all of my local adjustment presets mirrored over to ACR. If you know of a better way, please feel free to share in the comments. I’m always learning too.

The post Transfer Local Adjustment Presets to Camera Raw appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Transform Panel

Chip is referring to the Auto Upright button in the Transform panel.

When clicked, Auto does a pretty good job of correcting level, perspective distortion, and aspect ratio (how squished or stretched the building looks after the correction) in one click. Your mileage may vary with each photo you try it on, but it is often worth a shot. Bundling that function into a preset gives you the ability to apply it as part of your import process, in a batch function within the Library, or with a single click in the Presets panel. A cool benefit of having it available in the Presets panel is that you can give a live preview of its effectiveness simply by moving your cursor over the preset. All good reasons to want to give this a try.

Creating the Preset

To create a preset that applies the Auto correction in a way that tells Lightroom to analyze each photo to apply a correction unique to that photo you just have to select Upright Mode in the New Develop Preset dialog box. Here’s how:

1. Select an un-edited photo, then expand the Transform panel and click Auto. Only apply edits you want to include in this preset.
2. Go to Develop > New Preset (or click the + sign at the top of the Presets panel) to open the New Develop Preset dialog box.
3. Click Check None to clear any unwanted selections.
4. Check the box for Upright Mode in the Transform section (leave Upright Transforms unchecked).
5. Include any other settings you wanted to include, or just leave it with Upright Mode.
6. Give the preset a meaningful name and direct it to be saved in a logical group/folder for your workflow.
7. Click Create to complete the process.

With your preset ready to go, select a photo and move the cursor over the preset to get a live preview. Note, if you don’t see any change when moving your cursor over a preset go to Preferences > Performance, and check the box next to Enable hover preview of presets in Loupe. If you are happy with the correction, click the preset to apply.

I find also find it useful to have a Level preset on hand for the same reasons, as those are the two Upright functions I use the most. Thanks again, Chip for the question, and I hope that helps you with your photography.

The post Create an Auto Transform Preset appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

This is another one of the questions asked during our Lightroom Conference (which we’ll get to below), and it brought up another question: If you were to create a preset that applied an Auto Adjustment, would it apply the same Auto Adjustment to every image (moving the sliders to the same exact locations for every image), or would it analyze each image separately as it imports them, so each image would be Auto corrected individually, even if they were imported as a group of images?

Note: If you’re wincing at the thought of using Auto at all, I will tell you that today it’s vastly better than its ever been. It’s actually now quite useable as a starting place to being your editing, and for some folks, it will look good enough as an ending point, too (just depends on the image and the person editing it). Anyway, thought you’d want to know that Adobe has really worked to improve the Auto Feature big time.

Let’s answers both questions:

First, how to create an “Auto Preset” which is a bit different than you might think, because normally you would open an image; make all your edits, then save those edits as a preset. If you opened an image; hit the Auto button, and then made a preset, it would apply those same sliders in the same position to every photo, which is not what we want. To create an Auto Settings preset that works, you don’t do anything to your image (leave it untouched), then follow these steps:

STEP ONE: As I mentioned – don’t make any edits to your image; leave everything at zero and just head straight over to the Presets panel and choose ‘Create Preset’ as shown here).

STEP TWO: When the New Preset window appears (seen above), click the ‘Check None’ button (shown circled above in red) to deselect all the different Settings checkboxes.

STEP THREE: Now, in the Auto Settings section up in the top third of this window, turn on the checkbox for Auto Settings (as seen here). Also, you’ll notice that down in the regular Settings section there is still one checkbox checked for ‘Process Version.’ Leave that turned on, so you’re using the most recent Lightroom math behind the scenes. Now click the Create button, and your preset is done. In the next step let’s set it up to apply this preset automatically when you import any images.

STEP FOUR: Go to the Presets panel and right-click directly on your Auto Settings preset, and from the pop-up menu that appears, choose Apply on Import (as shown here), and you’re good to go.

By the way — after you choose this preset as your ‘Apply on Import’ choice, it adds a + (plus sign) after the preset’s name (as seen above) to let you know that preset has been designated as the Apply on Import preset. (NOTE: If you ever want to turn this feature off, just right-click on it and choose “Apply on Import” again).

Now to answer the 2nd part of this question…

…which is, will it apply the same settings to each image, or will it analyze each image separately and apply the appropriate Auto Correction for each image? Luckily, it’s “Smart” and will correct each image individually (though it’s amazingly fast at it).

Above: I imported six different images at the same time, all very different in tone, subject, etc. and applied the Auto Import preset as they were imported, and I took a capture of each of the images after the Auto Settings feature had been applied, and you can see that each of the image has a very different Auto Correction applied to it. So, yes, it does analyze each image on its own, and applies the correction, even when you import a group of images.

Hope you found that helpful. Keep being safe out there — here’s wishing you good health, and a great week ahead.

-Scott

The post How to Apply An Auto Correction Automatically On Import (and why you might want to in the first place) appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

After the last session of the day on Wednesday, we did a live 2-1/2 hour Lightroom Q&A featuring each of the conference instructors, and one recurring question was about presets and whether you could apply multiple presets to an image. The short answer is “Well, probably not but maybe” and because so many people had similar questions, I thought it might be a good idea to cover that here today.

We’ll start with a look at the Basic panel (seen here). This is before applying any preset, so all the sliders are set at their default zero setting.

Here’s the same panel after I applied a Develop Module preset. Remember, Presets simply move the sliders for you to preset positions, so that’s what you’re seeing above.

If I go and apply another Develop Module preset (which I did here) it messes up the look of the first preset entirely because it moved the Exposure slider, the Contrast slider, the Highlights and Shadows slider, the Blacks slider and both the Clarity and Dehaze sliders. So, applying the 2nd preset totally changed the look I applied in my first preset. It doesn’t “add” it one top of what the first preset it. It overwrites it.

Q. So, what type of Preset could I have applied that wouldn’t have destroyed my first preset?

A. One that doesn’t move those sliders. So, you could have applied a 2nd preset that didn’t mess with the first preset’s sliders at all if the 2nd preset only adjusted either the Vibrance, Saturation, or White Balance sliders. Or you could apply a preset that uses features found in different panels that hadn’t been used in the first preset. So, you could apply a preset that just adjusted the Tone Curve, or added Sharpening or a Vignette, etc., and applying a preset with just any of those wouldn’t move those Basic panel sliders that were applied from the first preset.

For example, look at the basic panel above — I applied the first preset, and then I applied a 2nd preset but it only had a Tone Curve adjustment, sharpening, an HSL/Color adjustment, and a vignette, none of which were in the first preset, so my Basic panel looks exactly the same as it did when I applied the first preset — adding those other things didn’t mess up the settings from my first preset, which only had Basic panel adjustments.

That’s why we say, “Maybe.” As long as the 2nd preset you apply doesn’t use the same sliders (or features) that were in the first preset, then yes, you can stack presets without it destroying the look of the first preset you applied, but in reality, that happens pretty rarely with presets. Most of the time when you apply a 2nd preset, it has enough sliders moved within it that it trashes the first look, but at least know you know why.

Hope you found that helpful.

Have a safe, happy, healthy weekend, everybody!

-Scott

The post The “Gotcha” of Applying Multiple Presets in Lightroom appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Thanks, Terry!

Today’s the last day to enter our big giveaway
It’s our “Win an all-expense paid trip to the Photoshop World Conference 2019” giveaway, and today’s the last day to enter and we’re picking a winner really soon. If you win we fly you to Photoshop World 2019 (your choice, Orlando in early summer or Las Vegas in late summer), and we pick up your hotel and meals, full conference pass, and you get the whole VIP experience on us. But you can’t win if you don’t enter. Go right now, enter the giveaway, and here’s hoping you win and we’ll see you at the conference.

Have a great weekend everybody, try to stay warm, and we’ll catch ya here next week.

-Scott

The post Three Key Things Terry Does To Every Portrait in Lightroom Classic (and how to apply them automatically) appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.