Lightroom 5 Preset: Silhouette

Here’s my fourth free Lightroom 5 preset, Silhouette. It’s a fairly straightforward black and white preset that works especially well for partial or whole silhouettes. Depending on the starting brightness of the photo, you might want to adjust the strength of the silhouette effect by adjusting the ‘blacks’ control in the develop panel. Here’s the first example, a shot of a former Fidelity colleague’s son jumping into a pool: And here’s a second, a buffalo in a field I snapped while driving through Custer State park in South Dakota: Here’s the download: Lightroom 5 Preset: Silhouette To install it in Lightroom, simply right click any preset, select import, and then select the downloaded preset file.

Lightroom 5 Preset: Vintage Rajasthan

Here’s my third free Lightroom 5 Preset, Vintage Rajasthan. My first two are here and here. I developed this one when editing a photo I took outside a temple in Udaipur, India. I was there working on an MIT research project, and got the shot on my way to a market in the early afternoon. The preset adjusts the color balance to add a vintage photo effect, and works well on shots that are vibrant with lots of colors. The original photo was bright and overwhelming, which to me was distracting, taking attention away from the the facial expressions. Here’s the photo with the preset: Here’s a second example: And one final: Here’s the download: Lightroom 5 Preset: Vintage Rajasthan To

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Lightroom 5 Preset: Bright Eyes

I had an encouraging response to my first lightroom preset posting last week, Burlington Northern. So I’ve decided to keep it up, and try to post new presets a couple times a month. Here’s my second posting, Bright Eyes. It’s a landscape effect that works particularly well around sunrise or sunset. It brings out the sky a bit, adds some highlight color, and enhances the sunlight’s reflection on grass and trees. I originally came up with it when editing the below photo of a tree in a field outside a Fidelity Investments office in Smithfield, Rhode Island. I used to work there on occasion, and the tree reminded me of the tree in the Shawshank Redemption, up in Maine where

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Lightroom 5 Preset: Burlington Northern

Over the past few years I’ve developed dozens of Adobe Lightroom presets, and I’ve recently begun to consolidate and organize them. For any readers who are unfamiliar with Lightroom, it’s a professional photography workflow application used to organize, edit, and publish photos. As part of the editing process, you can save collections of changed settings as presets so that a group of edits can be reused on other photos. When editing, I rarely use just a single preset — I’ll generally start with a preset that’s close to the look I’m trying to achieve, and then I’ll tweak the photo from there. But presets are an extremely useful tool, both to save time and to capture creative edits. I’ve decided to start posting some of

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