recommend natural-looking Lightroom presets?

January 17, 2022 6:40 PM

I use Lightroom to organize and edit large numbers of photos and am now (finally) looking for some good presets. But there are a ton of commercial presets out there to pick from! Help?

I do travel photography ranging from landscape to architecture to street photography. I shoot Olympus raw files and have used Lightroom for years to organize and edit (I don't do heavy manipulation or anything).

Now I've decided to look at commercial presets, hoping to find something that provides a very natural look---not over- or undersaturation, not film imitations, not instagram-filter style.

Any recommendations, fellow photographer Mefites?

posted by mkuhnell to Technology (2 answers total)

Response by poster: Any recommended guides on improving Lightroom workflow are also welcome!
(There are a lot; I just don't know which ones are good.)
posted by mkuhnell at 6:41 PM on January 17, 2022

When I was shooting a lot, I just made a general import preset of what I liked - very light contrast curve applied and nothing else, iirc. But depending on your preferences, you could make it however you want! No need to use somebody else's. I had a different import profile for each camera, so that JPGs from my point and shoot (haha, remember those?) didn't have any enhancement applied at import, but the RAW files from the SLR did have the slight curve.

If you take one fairly representative photo, apply whatever global changes you want (sharpening? de-fringing? lens corrections? contrast?), then save these as a preset, they'll make a pretty good starting place for all photos.
posted by bluesky78987 at 8:05 AM on January 18, 2022 [1 favorite]