Presets in Lightroom are a great way to turn a mundane image into something different. Like the image below. I took it as a stock shot. A good idea apparently, as I made a series of still lives recently and images were approved on Shutterstock yesterday in the morning, and I already sold three. But although seamless white works great for stock, the image is visually boring. So after I submitted my batch, I went back to the picks, and started going though my ever growing preset collection looking for a look. I settled for this 300 v1 look, coming from a movie I haven’t seen and never heard of. But I like the result. I added some color to the white background, accentuated the purple color of flowers, making yellow and white a bit less visible, and some vignette which draws the eye to the composition. The colors are less intesive, and the finished image has a vintage look.
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Back to presets. What I find the most exciting about them is that you can go through your list and try different ones and see which you like most on a particular image. And then tweak it, to make it work even better.
You can also try stacking presets, but the way they work, if two presets use the same slider, you will see the effect only of the last applied preset. What is saved in presets are values for a slider, not “add to” or “subtract from” amount.

There are few sources of presets I typically use:
1) Lightroom Killer Tips blog – I guess the name says it all, and Matt Kloskowski offers not only free presets, but video tutorials and short tips and advice.
2) X-equals
3) Presets heaven

Where are you getting your favorite Lightroom presets? Leave the link in the comments below.

Sleeping in a tent on the one of Airventure campings offers one huge advantage over staying in the hotel (usually at least an hour away). The chance to take images like it, in the first morning light, with warm glow and those long shadows. And without those crowds, at this time of the day there are not too many people around. It is a rare opportunity to take cleaner shots of the exhibit displays. Like those Diamond aircrafts. I still cannot decide what is drawing me to the image more- the repeating pattern of planes or those squares of fabric above them.

This was a surprisingly challenging image to prepare for blog. I love the composition, with the cobble stone lied space leading up to the restaurants and cafes filled Old Town Market in Warsaw. And the light star (or two stars) on the right add some interest to the cityscape as well.
But back to problems. It was a wide angle, fisheye shot, so first I wanted to correct the lens distortion a little bit. It usually results in loss of image corners, and the direction of correction this time, it was impossible just to add some space to the canvass to retain it (Photoshop work, for this one). Secondly, the city lights seems to have two different casts- yellow and green. I like the warm light color, but the green cast is driving me nuts. I really wish I used X-Rite passport on those night photos to solve the problem instantly. Lesson learned for next time. Meantime, no White Balance choice looked good enough. I settled for Daylight, and because the image has no whole bunch of different colors, I adjusted the single tones saturation selectively (lowered yellow, and took down aqua and green).

I know, I heard about it. Photographs of kittens are cliches. Well, I am not sure there is anything new about this shot of kittens. But I still like it. They are not trying to look cute. They are absolutely in their own world, busy, playing. I do not know what interested both kittens, what they are looking at- there was nothing there as far as I could tell. But they first found it scary enough to hide in the bushes, and then cautiously observed what was going on before emerging and continuing their way. Or maybe it was just a game to them.

Seabase in Oshskosh is probably my favorite spot to visit at the Airventure. It is a landing spot for all the float planes and sea planes. Located deep in the woods from the land, it has Lake Winnebago as a water runway. It is in a certain distance from the main events area, but well worth the trip. Although it is not as crazy busy, as the airport, there is still something going on there, and enough crowds are present at all times. Take a look at the midday activities recorded this year in all the detail in this panorama.

I want to show today an image which would probably look great as HDR, but was not shot this was . The very bright sun just made it impossible to render both sky and the building, but the sun flare was just lovely.
At the same time, the image I shot has a simple silhouette of an interesting old architectural detail. It is a view on the Barbacan, old town walls, in Warsaw.

I liked it, but a the same time I wanted to explore how the image would look like if I went for HDR (or at least used a grad filter). And I remembered the recent tutorial from David Ziser. The trick was – Fill Light all the way, Noise Reduction Color slider all the way.

I did not any other Noise reduction slider. And just look how it smoothed the colors. LR3 just proves that you can in fact recover far more from you seriously underexposed image! I mean, just look at the black original. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the effect. I am not promoting not paying attention to how you expose, not to bracket and such- but you can go back to some older images, and redo them on your computer with just two clicks.
So, which image do you like more? The mysterious silhouette or the full of detail “normal” exposure? Leave a comment below!

I was preparing this image for stock submission this week when I realized it would look great in some kind of duotone. You usually wouldn’t submit an image processed this way to stock, so I worked on a virtual copy for blog. There was just not too much color wise in the image, with grey soil and brown animals. After I turned it into black and white, I adjusted color by color to contrast them. Then I started playing with tint presets in Lightroom and I remembered the Serengeti chocolate preset from David duChemin recent e-book (you can check the review on this blog, too). It looked great, and I just tweaked it a bit to separate the cows form their environment even better.

The Stony Stairs is a name of a very narrow, short street at the Old Town Warsaw. The steep stairs take you down from busy heart of Old Town streets down to the Vistula River. But those stylized lanterns just draw your eyes with the simplicity of shape and the repeating pattern. With the right point of view, they create one entity, like links of the chain.

I finally found time to go shopping for the ingredients for Matt’s summer salad. I wanted to take part in Lara Ferroni challenge, and make and photograph non-salad based salad. Of course, I had to improvise, and my recipe doesn’t contain mint nor yellow tomatoes. But I was able to find edible green leaves not being salad (namely parsley) and we bought some yellow bell pepper to have enough colors.
I build the salad from watermelon, yellow bell pepper, tomato, grapes, cucumber and feta-type cheese. Put it out on the glass garden table and used early afternoon sun to backlight the subject. I added a couple of peppers, matching the colors on the salad and a bunch of parsley to fill the space, as I couldn’t find any interesting looking napkin in my father-in-law’s house. I added some interest to the background.
The one thing which intrigued me in the challenge was Lara Ferroni comment about difficulty to take a horizontal photo. It never bothered me, but I also don’t think I was using the background of my set enough. But I noticed something browsing through my salad images.
It seems that with the higher camera position, my photo looked more interesting. And the reason for it was, that instead of including whaever was far behind my set, I had more space taken by the plate with the salad.
I played a bit with the aperture for the shot, and as much as I liked the shallow depth of field of f/4.8, it seemed like not enough of salad ingredients were in sharp focus. I was between f/6.3 and f/9 (I took images with random increments), and finally went with f/6.3.
I did only basic post processing on it, like clarity and vibrance, I adjusted tines as the image seemed very bright, there is so much white there, and added a bit of sharpening.