Perfect Presets: A Perfect Free Companion

22.12.2010
For professional photographers and serious hobbyists, is key to their image editing workflow. They use it to sort, organize, develop, and publish photos, often as a preliminary to working on their pictures in Photoshop. However, Lightroom's image editing module, Develop, has become so powerful and versatile that for many photographers it is replacing Photoshop for basic editing. What makes Lightroom so valuable is that once you have mastered the program and defined frequently used custom settings (presets), you can move quickly from upload of the pictures to your computer to actually using them. OnOne Software's has over 190 predefined presets that can speed up your workflow, while providing guidance to help you more quickly master the Develop module.

Perfect Presets is organized intelligently, according to the way most photographers work. For instance, the presets start with optimizing tools, with White Balance listed first, followed by tone curve settings, on through to color and tone settings and ending with special effects, such as tinting, split-toning, or vignettes.

Using the presets is easy and fun. Hovering your mouse over a preset's name applies the settings to a small preview. Clicking applies it to your image (though you can always undo any of the settings). You can then use Lightroom's various Develop module tools to fine-tune the edit, and, if you wish, save it as a new custom preset.

Perfect Presets is not only a productivity tool that can speed up your workflow, while leaving you free to be as creative as you want--it is also a great educational tool, providing guidance over how Lightroom's Develop tools work and how different settings will affect your pictures. The only downside is that you might find your workflow bogged down not by the presets, but by your creative curiosity and the vast number of different editing options that the Perfect Presets open up. We cannot imagine why anyone who uses Lightroom wouldn't want to download this free plug-in.