Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

Tuesday’s Monday Presets

By mattk on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 10:17 am | Presets.

I know, the presets usually come on Monday but I wanted to change it up this week. ;) Actually, yesterday just got away from me. Anyway, this week I've got some presets for you that are specifically geared for sunsets with lots of sky. As I was looking through my photos I realized there were basically two types of sunsets - cool or warm. The cooler ones typically had lots of blues and some reds in them. The warmer ones had more of a yellowish color to them. So I made a few tweaks in White Balance as well as HSL and saved them a while back. Now whenever I have a sunset photo I usually give these a try first and I get great results most of the time. If anything, it's a great starting point and you can always go tweak the Temperature and Tint settings under White Balance for more or less of the effect. Have at 'em!

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt's Cool/Warm Sunset Presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

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Thom Dombrowski Says:
December 18th, 2007 at 11:48 am

Matt

Thanks, I used them on some photos that I took at the balloon fiesta in N.M. I have been(have) had a hard time getting a consistent color across the sky. They help out.. I have a problem where some of the photos taken, have the nice blue sky in the middle and top, and then gets washed out as you come to the horizon. Some day I will take the time to learn Photoshop and get the results I want. As always, thanks for the presets.

Thom

mattk Says:
December 18th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

Hi Thom,
Man… I’m jealous. I’ve been wanting to go to the balloon festival for years. I can never seem to get out there. Oh well. As for washed out toward the horizon, that happens a lot. That’s where all of the light is and many times it tends to be the most lifeless part of the sunset. Not always but it happens on my photos as well. Anyway, thanks!

Matt K

Thom Dombrowski Says:
December 18th, 2007 at 1:04 pm

Thanks for the info.. I just happened to be there by accident, and it was a great accident.

Peter M Says:
December 18th, 2007 at 2:37 pm

Matt,

Thanks for the “cool”, I mean “hot”, no I mean “warm” presets.

I did a quick preset to one of the images I took one evening, just outside of Zion and used your warm preset and increased blacks to create a silhouette.

No other adjustments made except your preset and blacks within Lightroom. (plus crop)

You can see before and after on my NAPP portfolio.
http://www.photoshopuser.com/members/portfolios/view/gallery/791376

Keep up the good work,

KennyD Says:
December 18th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

Hey Matt - thanks for a great blog and all the presets you do. I know this is a LR blog, but I was wondering if there was any way for those of us who just use Bridge + ACR to use these presets - after all, LR developing is just a skin of ACR, right?

mattk Says:
December 18th, 2007 at 11:07 pm

Kenny,
You can create presets in ACR as well but you can’t take the LR presets and use them there. You’d have to mimic the settings used from LR in ACR. (it’s just not as smooth though)

KennyD Says:
December 19th, 2007 at 12:36 am

Thanks Matt. You’re the best, no matter what my fellow canuck Dave Cross might say

lsim001 Says:
December 19th, 2007 at 1:41 am

Thanks for the presets. Also I thought having some samples of the presets in use was a good idea. It’s just the “picture speaks louder than words” cliche.

Rich Lemmon Says:
December 19th, 2007 at 12:31 pm

Firstly, thanks for the excellent suggestions; I regularyly visit your site.

The one area that I’m not clear on is cropping to print versus cropping to view on my website. I will take approx. 250 photos during a shoot. Next, I narrow them down to about 20-30 keepers. I crop them to what looks good on my website and post them for users to review.

Once I’m ready to print, I find that the web-crop doesn’t necessarily match the cropping sizes offered by my printing company. As a result, I have to re-crop the photo to fit into a standard format (5×7, 8×10…etc) which almost always means losing or including more information than I wanted to.

Am I doing something incorrectly? Do you have any advice on the best way to crop-once and use for both web and print?

Thanks!!!

Rich Lemmon