Transcripts
1. Find Download and Install Presets for Lightroom and ACR - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class. Find, download, install and edit free and for-fee presets for 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 application 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 finding, downloading, and installing, as well as editing presets for Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. I'm going to show you some presets that you can download, we're going to download them and then we're going to install them into each application, use them and also update them with some edits. 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. I'm going to ask you to do something really special because these Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch classes have a very small audience at Skillshare, I really need your help to get the word out. One of the ways that you can get the word out for these classes is to give them a thumbs up if you're enjoying them, and write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. I'm committed to giving you an Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom for Lunch class every Thursday, but I really need your help to make them work. Now, if you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started finding, downloading, installing, and editing presets in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom.
2. Pt 1 - Lightroom Install Presets: We're going to start by looking at how to install presets into Lightroom. I've chosen a site called presetheaven.com to use. The reason for this is that this site does not require you to give up any personal information when you're downloading presets. The person who created this site created a preset every day of the year for 365 days and made the presets available. You can just scroll through the older entries when you get to this site and find a preset that you like. This is the one I'm going to use. When you click on it, you're taken to a page that shows you the preset in use, so you can determine if it's what you want, and then if you like it, just click on the blue download button. This will allow you to download just this one preset. Now, the presets are going to download really quickly because they're really tiny files. They're downloading as a Zip file, so on a PC, you'll need to extract these files into a folder. On the Mac, that'll probably be already done for you. You'll need to remember the location of that folder, but of course, it'll be in your downloads folder. The lrtemplate file is the file that you need. We'll go to Lightroom now and open the presets panel, that's in the Develop module of course. I don't have a folder for preset heaven presets, but I think I would like one. I'm just going to right-click on any of these folders and choose "New Folder." I'm going to call mine Preset Heaven and click "Create." We now have a folder called Preset Heaven, but there is nothing in it. But I want to put the preset that I just downloaded into here, so I'm going to locate my cursor right opposite preset heaven and right-click, and I'm going to choose "Import." I'm going to locate the lrtemplate file that I just downloaded. I'm going to select it and click "Import." Sometimes when you unzip a series of presets, you're going to have multiple presets. You can just click on the first one and shift click on the last one to import all of them at the onetime. That's perfectly acceptable to bring all of them in at once, but this time, we just have one, so I'm going to click "Import." As I do, just watch the image behind me. Because what Lightroom does, as it's importing presets, it will apply those presets to the image. If that's not what you wanted to happen, you'll need to go back to the History panel and you'll see what presets have been applied to this image. You can just back off by selecting the last entry in the History panel before it started to apply presets to the image. Just be aware of that, because if you had an image in front of you as you were installing presets, you may not realize that in the process, Lightroom is going to apply those presets to the image. Here is my preset, heaven preset and this time, I did click on it because I wanted to apply it to the image. This preset file has been picked up by Lightroom and placed in a special location on disk. You can see this by right-clicking the preset and choose "Show in Explorer." On a Mac, that would read "Show in Finder." You can go and see where this has been placed. There is a special folder, this is the Windows one. There will be something similar on the Mac in which your presets are being stored. When they're installed in Lightroom and provided you don't move those files on disk, they're always going to appear in your presets list. Now, as I mentioned in my previous class on presets, there's nothing in these presets that you couldn't do to the image of yourself. The presets just involve changes of settings in the panels here in Lightroom. If you like this preset, but you think perhaps you'd like a few more blacks in your image, or you can just wind back the blacks. You can use these as a starting point for your edits, or an ending point for your image. You can do whatever you like with them, but just remember that there's nothing in them that you could not have created yourself. It's just that preset sometimes make it quicker and easier to get effects for your images.
3. Pt 2 - Lightroom Edit a Downloaded Preset: Before we finish up with looking at these presets in Lightroom, let's consider the situation where we often use the preset that we just downloaded and installed but we find that the Blacks are not quite rich enough so that every time we use this preset, we drop down the Blacks, we reduce the Blacks in the image. Now, if we do that every time we use the preset, we might consider the situation where we would build this Black adjustment into the preset. So let's look and see how we do that. Now the first thing that you're going to want to do is to reset an image. So you want to take an image all the way back to what it was out of the camera. So I'm going to click the "Reset" button here and then I'm going to go and add that preset to it. So I'm going to select here on the "Preset Heaven" preset. Now we're going to wind back the "Blacks". So this is now the new preset that we want to save and we can do it two ways, we can save a brand new version of the presets so we could come in here and click the "+" and save this as a brand new preset. I might call it this number and then add 'edited' onto the end of it. But you can also update the presets so I'm going to right-click this one and you can see here that I can update it with the current settings and if I do that, I'm going to change the preset that "Preset Heaven" gave me and it's going to be updated with this extra Black. So anytime I use this updated preset, it's always going to have this black adjustment in it. So that's a decision that you can make, either you create a brand new copy of the preset with perhaps 'edited' on the end, or you can update the current one with the settings that you have changed.
4. Pt 3 - ACR Install Presets: We're now going to have a look at the very different situation of installing presets for Adobe Camera Raw. Now, the presets that you get for Adobe Camera Raw are xmp files which is in contrast to the Lightroom ones which are lrtemplate files. They're not compatible with each other. You can't use Lightroom presets in Adobe Camera Raw. You can take them across there, and I have another class that I'll link to in the class project area that goes into that process, but for now what we're looking for is straight Adobe Camera Raw presets. I'll give you the link to this site because they have a lot of Adobe Camera Raw presets. You'll want to just make sure that you select and download the Adobe Camera Raw versions. For example, you could use the prop your color preset, and you'll just click on Adobe Camera Raw, and it will be opened in this MediaFire link, and you'll just click to download this. It's a very small file. It's going to download pretty instantaneously. Once you've done that, you'll need to open an image in Adobe Camera Raw. I'm just in Photoshop, I'm just going to open an image which is a DNG or a raw image, and it's going to open automatically in Adobe Camera Raw because it's a raw image, it can't be opened in Photoshop. Now we'll go to the presets panel which is here, and we want to know where the presets are stored. What I'm going to do is click the Hamburger menu here, and I'm going to choose save settings. Not because I want to save those settings, but because I want to know where they're supposed to be saved too. I'm going to click "Save". Here is the folder in which Adobe Camera Raw expects my presets to be in. On a Windows machine, I could select this and copy it, but I've got my downloads folder open here and here is the pop your color preset. What I could do is I could just drag and drop it here, into the correct location. Now, I'm going to actually do that. You've got a couple of options, either you can go and get this folder name, so you could move the preset into that folder using Windows Explorer. But if you've got a Windows Explorer, Window open, you can just drag and drop it anyway. Now to get out of this, I'm going two have to click "Cancel" because I don't want to save the settings because I only came here to find this folder location. I'm going to click "Cancel". Now, the new preset that I just dragged and dropped into the presets folder isn't showing up here. The reason for that is that Adobe Camera Raw looks for these presets when it first launches. This list is set in concrete unless you actually save one of your own presets. But because we moved that other one into it, it's not actually going to be in this list. What I need to do is to cancel out of here, and then go and open that file again. This time Adobe Camera Raw is going to relaunch, and now if I go to the presets, I'll say the popular color preset. It's just a little bit fiddly as to how you get your presets in there. It's a little bit different to Lightroom, but now I can click on this preset and here is the popular color preset in place on the image. Again, presets in Adobe Camera Raw there's nothing that is in that preset that you could not have done manually using the settings here in Adobe Camera Raw. A preset is just a collection of settings that you could have set yourself. Now this can be the finishing point for your image or it could be a starting point, so you could go ahead and edit your image should you wish, from here.
5. Pt 4 - Edit an ACR Preset: Before we finish looking at presets, let's look at the situation where, for example, you want to save a change to a preset. You may use a preset such as pop_your_color all of the time, but you might find that when you use it, you need to increase the exposure a little bit. You would like to save that preset as an edited version so that you don't have to come in and adjust the exposure each time, so it's part of an edited preset. Let's see how you would do this. The first thing that you need to do is you need to remove any adjustments that you've made to this image at all. We're going to the hamburger icon here and we're going back to Camera Raw defaults. We're stripping this image of any changes at all. Everything here is either zeroed out or it is at the settings that are standard for all Camera Raw files. For example, here you would always have a color noise reduction setting of 25 because that's standard for Camera Raw images. We've zeroed everything out. Now, let's go to our preset pop_your_color, and we're going to apply that to the image. We've got a regular Raw file plus our preset. Now we'll go to the basic panel and we're going to add some exposure. I'm going to add 0.8 of exposure. Because I'm saying, "Well, I always do it. So this is what I want to build into my preset edit". There's the 0.8. At this point, we would now save this as an editor preset, so we're going to presets, and we're going to the flyout menu and we're going to choose Save Settings. We're going to choose what we want to include in that preset. Now for this exercise, I'm going to include everything, and I'll click Save. I'm going to call this pop_your_color_edited. I'll click Save. Now pop_your_color is in the presets list and so too is the edited version. Now, you might think that if I was to select a pop_ your_color, that the exposure setting is going to be removed from this image so it's going to get darker. Well, let's test it. I click on it and nothing happens. Let's go back to our original Camera Raw defaults. This is the image out of the camera. This is what pop_your_color looks like. It's popped color, but there's no exposure compensation in it. Here is pop_your_color_edited. It does have an exposure compensation in it. But if we go back to pop_your_color, there's no reduction of exposure. The reason for this is that when the person who created pop_your_color created it and when they went two save settings, they didn't check exposure. So there is no exposure setting in that preset. The exposure setting is whatever the image happens to be exposed at. Let's go back here and let's go and reset the image again to Camera Raw defaults. Let's go to exposure and let's crank up the exposure here. I'm going to add about one-and-a-half stops of exposure to this image. Now let's go to presets and let's click pop_your_color. Well, the exposure is remaining at 1.5 because there was no exposure setting in pop_your_color. Pop_your_color did things with vibrance and saturation, but not with exposure. That's an important thing to have in the back of your mind with these presets in both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, is that not everything that was configured for the image including the defaults are necessarily in that preset. If you're interested in what a preset actually looks like, I have one open here in WordPad because it's just a text document. It's just a series of settings here from Adobe Camera Raw that are saved in a file and Adobe Camera Raw opens that file, reads off the settings, makes some changes to the sliders, and that's what you're preset is. If you're ever curious about what settings have been made in a preset, then you can just open up the XMP file in a text editor. The text editor is on the Mac, there are text editors like WordPad and Notepad on the PC that you could use.
6. Project and Wrap up: Your project for this class is very simple, I just like you to show me a website where you found some presets that you can download for Adobe Camera Raw, and Lightroom, so we can share this as a resource amongst all the students in this class. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned quite a bit about finding, downloading, installing, and also editing presets in both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. When you see the prompt to recommend this class to others, you know what to do. Please, if you enjoyed the class, give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class to help other students find these classes. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and 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™
