One of Lightroom’s great strengths is the speed at which it enables us to work with our imagery. Lightroom offers us flexibility and efficiency when ingesting a card full of photos, developing a batch of images, and even exporting to the web or printing. One of the ways in which we can speed up our work flow is to use develop presets to save a favorite photo treatment. Going beyond a only a simple adjustment such as exposure or saturation, a treatment is a set of adjustments to give an image or a set of images a specific look.
Much like plugins, treatment presets can be a great way to kickstart your creativity when you are looking for a new or different way to look at an image. Lightroom comes with a number of default treatments. They can be found in the develop module’s Presets panel with the prefix Creative, e.g. Creative – Sepia. Many of these are cliché or overused, but they offer a great starting place.
Creative - Sepia treatment preset applied
There are a lot of free treatment presets available online. Search google or check out Matt Kloskowski’s Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips which has a lot of great treatments and other presets available too. This is one called Sin City – Dark Red.
Original and Sin City - Dark Red treatment preset
Finally, experiment and build some of your own. The image below shows a fun portrait treatment I created called “1897 Portrait”
Original and 1897 Portrait treatment preset applied
March 31st, 2010 at 12:55 pm
To see this in Aperture terms, see my blog post from the Translating Lightroom series:
http://www.bobrockefeller.com/blog/treatments-in-aperture.html
Bob