Using Lightroom Preset Part 2: Customizing Contrast, Fading, and skin tones
Why customize?
Personal style. You might like to be able to control how much highlight or shadow fading there is in your images, amongst other things.
Consistency in varying shooting situations. Being able to tweak settings can help you achieve a similar look across both high contrast and low contrast scenes.
Skin tones. Sometimes skin tones can look a bit funky in certain lighting with certain presets. Tweak the settings to flatter skin.
In this post I go through how to customize your presets to suit a variety of situations. I will be mostly using my own presets (you can find them at my preset store on Etsy), but I also include an example of customizing a Dawn Charles preset.
Portrait of a photographer: Sam Broomby
Sam Broomby is an incredibly talented photographer currently based in Canberra (but will be Montreal based as of next year). He has a compelling and evocative photographic style and is a constant source of inspiration for me.
Sam kindly agreed for me to take his portrait last weekend. We spoke about the past and the future I was grateful that he allowed me to capture some of the raw emotions in these portraits.
See his work at www.samuelbroomby.com
Portraits at the abandoned Tooth's Brewery Mittagong
The old abandoned Tooth & Co Brewery in Mittagong (otherwise known as Mittagong Maltings) is a big of a photographer's wonderland. When you climb up into the higher levels- the light coming through the roof, the geometry of the beams, the colour of the wood- at the right time of day it is just magic.
A group of us went on a little road trip a couple of weekends ago to do some shooting and scouting- myself, Sam (another photographer), Amaliah (model), and Kirstey (MUA).
Model // Amaliah Cornelius
MUA // Kirsty Anderson
Photography // Me
Colour images edited with LIFE//STYLE Lightroom Preset, Black and Whites edited with B&W Filmic Fade preset.
Introducing LIFESTYLE: a clean, modern preset for LR and ACR
LIFE//STYLE is a preset with a clean and modern feel. It is a versatile preset that works with a large range of portraiture and lifestyle photography from couples portraits, family portraits, interior photos, still life, and the plus (+) form is great for editorial work. As with many of my presets, I developed this to create flattering skin texture and tones - aiming to reduce the retouching time in Photoshop.
L//S is not a one trick pony- in higher key (brighter) images, it creates a clean bright airy look typical of lifestyle photography; in lower key (darker) images, it gives a rich, cinematic feel to the colours.