Transcripts
1. Create and Use Presets in Lightroom and ACR Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class - Create and Use Presets in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both applications share the same base code. This means that within one class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today, we're going to look at an introduction to presets in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Now I'm going to show you what presets are and how you can create your own, and how they're going to speed up your processing. We'll also look at what can be included in a preset and what cannot. You'll learn to make your own presets for both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw because they are different and each uses a different file format. You'll also learn a trick for applying presets in Bridge and a really quick technique that helps you take presets from Lightroom to Adobe Camera Raw so you can use them there. Now, this is a really cool technique because it's going to let you use free and for-fee Lightroom presets in Adobe Camera Raw. Now if you're watching these videos using your browser, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up. Secondly, if you would write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, then please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started on presets in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom.
2. Presets - Pt 1 -Lightroom - Create a Preset: We're going to start our exploration of presets here in Lightroom. I'm going to make some quick edit to this image. I'm going to start with rotating it just to straighten it up a little bit, and I can crop it as well should I wish to. I'm going to adjust the temperature in the image just to warm it up a little bit. I'm going to go towards the yellow here. I'm going to bring down the highlights quite a bit. I'm going to open up the shadows to lighten the image. I'm going to check my white point by holding Alt or Option, and just backing off as soon as I see the clouds here are blowing out. I'm going to add quite a bit of black to this image. Having done that, I'm going to go back and reopen up my shadows too. I'm going to back off clarity a little bit because I want to softer look to the image. Then I'm going to apply a radial filter adjustment. So I'm just going to drag out my radial filter. By default in Lightroom, this is going to apply outside the circle here. So what I'm going to do is reduce clarity, and I'm also going to reduce sharpness so that I'm softening the edges of the image. I'm going to add a bit of noise. I'm now going to the brush here because I want to adjust this radial filter. As you can see, the green area's where the radial filter is being applied. So I'm going to go to the erase here. I'm just going to erase the radial filter from the bridge itself and the water just under the bridge. If I go to the A or B brush, then I can add other areas to this. So I'm just going to make sure that the brush goes all the way across the trees here and round the edge. So effectively, I'm adjusting how the radial filter is being applied to this image. I'll turn off the mask overlay. Yours is going to be pink. Mine just happens to be green, and I'll click "Done". To add a little bit more softness, I'm going to add a graduated filter here from the bottom of the image. So I'll click and drag upwards, and again, I'm going to backoff sharpness and back-off clarity just to soften this quite a bit, and I'll click "Done". So this is the look that I want for this image. But it's also a look that I would like to use for other images. I really like this soft focus around the edge, and a central point in the image that's increased the focus. I quite often shoot images that are vaguely symmetrical. So having gone to the trouble of editing this image, I would like to save these Edit settings so I could use them later on. The answer is of course, that I can do so using a preset. I'm going to open this left-hand panel up here. I have a Presets option, and you will have one too. Although you may not have as many presets as I have, you will have the Lightroom presets because they come with Lightroom. You'll have a User presets folder, which is where you can store your own personal presets. But you can also create your own folder should you wish. To save these edits as a preset, I'm going to click here on Create New Preset. I can give my preset a name. Now some people choose creative names and other people a little bit more specific as to what the preset actually does. I like to be a little bit creative, so I'm calling mine Early Morning Light. By default, it's going to be saved in the User presets folder. But I have a folder up here called Helen creative effects that this one really belongs in. So I'm going to put it in my own custom folder. The settings here are those which are going to be saved in the preset. So Lightroom by default, is going to save the current white balance setting, the basic tone adjustments, the shape of the tone curve, whether or not clarity is applied to the image and exactly how much clarity. So all of these settings are going to be saved in the preset. You may notice that there are some settings that are not going to be saved in the preset. For example, crop and rotation are not saved in the preset. Neither is the spot removal tool, or the red-eye tool, or the adjustment brush. So that's why I used a graduated filter and the radial filter for adjusting this image. Because I knew that the adjustment brush is not able to be saved in a preset. So that's something to consider. For now, I'm happy with just leaving all those check-boxes selected and I'll click "Create". I now have a preset in my Helen creative effects group of presets called Early Morning Light. I can go ahead and apply that to any image in future. Now I have another image here in my filmstrip. I'm just going to click on it. Let's go and apply the Early Morning Light preset to it. To do it, all I need to do is to go to my preset panel and click on Early Morning Light. The image is now adjusted using that preset. But a preset is just a set of adjustments in Lightroom. There's nothing magical to presets. There's nothing that you can put in a preset that you can't set using these settings here. So having applied that preset, this could be one of two things. It could be the finishing point for my image, I might just go ahead and start working on another image. Or I might say, "Well it works here, but I'd like to make an adjustment or two to it." So I'm going to click on the radial filter option and pick up my radial filter. For this image, I might want to move my radial filter down a little bit. I may want to double-check how it's been applied to the image. Well, I'm just going to adjust it with the brush. So I'm going to go and erase it a little bit around here, just so I get a bit more detail in the center-point of my image. When I'm done, I'll just click "Done". So I've used the preset as a starting point for editing this image, but I can make adjustments to it. I can delete any of the filters that have been applied to the image. I can adjust any other setting, and I can adjust settings that weren't even encoded in the preset. So for example, the preset didn't include any tone curve adjustment because I hadn't applied one to the original image. But you know what? If I want to apply it to this image, that's just fine. Once you've created a preset in Lightroom, it's going to be there every time you open Lightroom. So it's always going to be available to you for editing any image.
3. Presets - Pt 2 - ACR - Create a Preset: We're now going to turn our attention to presets in Adobe Camera Raw. Now, the situation in Adobe Camera Raw is quite a bit different to the situation in Lightroom. Firstly, the presets are called by different names. In this case, they'll be saved as XMP files. So the two are not compatible. So you can't on the face of it, use an Adobe Camera Raw preset in Lightroom or vice versa. Although we're going to see a process in a minute that will give us some of the features, at least. In addition, in Adobe Camera Raw, you can't include graduated filter or radial filter adjustments in your presets. That makes Adobe Camera Raw presets a lot less powerful than those in Lightroom. Like Lightroom, you also can't save adjustments made using the adjustment brush, the spot removal tool, or the red eye removal tool. So they're all excluded from presets, as are the crop and straighten tools. So we're going to make some quick alterations to this image. Firstly, I'm just going to straighten it to the top of the bridge. I'm going to warm it up with some temperature, I'm going to adjust the exposure a little bit, just making sure I haven't blown it out by holding the Alt or Option key as I adjust it, just to increase the whites a little bit. Again, using the Alt or Option key, Alt or Option on the blacks just to make sure I've got some blacks in this image. I think I'm going to bring back my blacks a little bit because I want this misty look. I'm going to back-off clarity a bit, but perhaps increase vibrance. I'm going to back-off highlights a little bit. So once I've made the adjustments to this image, if this is a look that I want to apply to other images, I can save it as a preset. Again, simply no point in applying these filters to the image because they can't be saved in a preset. Of course, I can apply them to the image, it just won't be saved in the preset. To get to my presets, I'm going to click here on the Preset option. Now, again, unlike Lightroom, in Adobe Camera Raw, you can't even have folders of presets. All your presets are going to be in the one place. So that means that this list can get out of control pretty quickly. There is a trick, however, to naming your presets to make sure that yours are easier to find. I'm going to click here on the hamburger icon and choose save settings. This is a list of settings that can be included in a preset. You'll notice that the graduated and radial filters are not here, but there are all the basic settings. Your curve can be saved. Sharpening, luminance and color noise reduction, HSL, that Hue Saturation and Luminance adjustments can be saved. If this were a gray-scale converted image, then you could save your gray-scale conversion. Split toning, transforming, lens vignetting, lens profile corrections, stay-highs, there's quite a lot of things that can be saved in a preset. Now you can deselect any of these if you don't want to save it in the preset, but we're going to save everything here. So I'm just going to click "Save". Adobe Camera Raw opens up my Adobe Camera Raw Settings folder, and this is where your preset is going to be saved. Now I told you that there was a trick to making sure your presets would be easy to find, and most people will prefix them with something like AA, and that will put them at the top of the list. I'm calling this Early Morning Fog Light. It's going to be saved as an XMP file. Again, different to the format that Lightroom uses. I'll click Save. You'll see that my preset now appears at the top of the list. That's why I prefixed it with AA. You can apply any preset to an image by just clicking on the presets. So I have a number of presets here that I can apply to my image. I can go back to my Early Morning Light by just clicking on it. Now, because the Adobe Camera Raw presets are saved as external XMP files, they're always going to be available whenever you open an image in Adobe Camera Raw.
4. Presets - Pt 3 - Apply ACR Presets in Bridge: Before we wrap up our look at presets, there are two things that I want to look at. One of them is applying presets via Bridge. The second is how you can take presets from Lightroom so that you can use them in Adobe Camera Raw. But let's look at Bridge first. I have a folder of images open here in Bridge. If I right-click on an image, I can go to Develop Settings, and what Bridge calls developed settings are actually the presets that were available in Adobe Camera Raw. So here is my early morning fog light preset. If I click on it, it's immediately applied to this image, and I can apply that same preset to another image. Right-click, Developed Settings, go and find my new preset, and apply it to the image. You'll see a little indicator here in the top right corner of the image, telling you that it has a preset applied to it.
5. Presets - Pt 4 - Lightroom Presets in ACR: We're going to finish up by having a look at how you can take presets that have been created for Lightroom and use them in Adobe Camera Roll. Now first of all, we need to discuss the limitations because in Lightroom, you can save Graduated Filter and Radial Filter adjustments in your presets. Presets that you download free or that you buy may well include these kind of adjustments. You won't be able to take those adjustments to Adobe Camera Roll, so that is a limitation. However, this process is a good way of harnessing some of the power of presets. There are lots of free and for-fee presets for Lightroom that are available on the web. There are precious few available for Adobe Camera Roll. If you can find presets that are available for Lightroom, this is how you can make use of them in Adobe Camera Roll. Now, I have a preset that I've created that is a preset that does not include a Graduated filter or a Radial filter, so it's ideal for taking to Adobe Camera Roll. I'm going to open up my Presets folder and it's here in my creative effects, and it's a green purple split tone effect. This is the preset applied to the image. Just quite simply, split toning just colors the light areas of the image, one color on the dark areas of the image, a different color. This is a Green Purple Split Tone effect. For me to be able to create this as a preset in Adobe Camera Roll, first of all, I'm going to apply it to an image, and I want to apply it to an image with no other adjustments. I didn't make any other adjustments to the image before I applied this preset. That's really important because you don't want to take any image specific adjustments with you. Having not fixed the image and then applied the preset to it in Lightroom, I'm going to right-click my image. I'm going to choose Edit In, and I'm choosing here Open as Smart Object in Photoshop. Now that critical, you can't use this edit in Photoshop. You must open it as a Smart Object, so I'm going to click on that. We'll wait as Photoshop now opens the image as a Smart Object. Here's my layers palette, and here's my image Smart Object. Now, what we're going to do next is just locate this little icon in the bottom right corner of the image in the layers palette. Of course you can get to that by choosing Window and then Layers, and we're going to double-click on it. What that does is it opens out image in Adobe Camera Roll. We've come from Lightroom to Photoshop, and then we say to Photoshop, "We need to edit this Smart Object". Photoshop has just dumped the image back and Adobe Camera Roll. Instead of, we might have expected Lightroom, but it's going to work for us here because now we have our image with all of its adjustments open in Adobe Camera Roll. We can save the adjustments as a preset. Click on the "Presets panel", click the "Hamburger icon", click "Save Settings", click "Save". I'm going to call this Purple Green Split Tone and click "Save". When I'm done, I can just click "Okay." I'm returned to Photoshop. I don't actually need to do anything further because this Purple Green Split Tone effect has now been saved as a preset in Adobe Camera Roll. It's going to be available for any image that I open in Adobe Camera Roll at anytime in the future. I've gone back now and I opened another DNG image in Adobe Camera Roll and we'll say that the preset that we just saved is available for this image. Here is the Purple Green Split Tone effect, and I'll click to apply it to the image. Of course, this could be a finishing point for the image, or it could just be a starting point for the further adjustments that I want to make to this image. But here's our early morning fog light, Purple Green Split Tone effect, and all the other ACR presets that I have installed.
6. Pt 5 Project and wrapup: Your project for this class is going to be to do one of the three things: either create a preset in Lightroom, or create one in Adobe Camera Raw, or if it makes better sense to you, go and take a Lightroom preset to Adobe Camera Raw. What I want you to do is to do something that's going to be effective for your workflow. Post a picture of your image with your preset applied to it in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about creating your own presets in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. If you were watching these videos using your browser, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too may enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
