Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

Welcome back to another edition of Matt’s Free Presets. This week the preset is one that I’ve been experimenting with a lot lately. I call it Vividity. It’s not really a word but I think it should be so I’ve named my preset in hopes that millions of people will follow and eventually force the dictionary gods (whoever they may be) to add it. Anyway, dreams aside, the preset does just what you think it does. It adds a degree of vividness (which is a word) to your photos. There’s a few different flavors that you’ll see when you download. Level 1 is the least vivid and Level 3 is the most. I recommend staying away from the Level 3 for portraits or photos with people in them as it looks a little too punchy. Otherwise, enjoy ‘em and let me know what you think by posting a comment. Thanks!

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt’s Vividity Presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

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According to Tom Hogarty, Lightroom’s Product Manager, Adobe has temporarily removed the link from their website for the 1.4 update. There seems to be some “issues” with it so they’ve decided to take it down for now. If you haven’t installed it then don’t worry - there’s nothing more you need to do. If you have installed it, you can get the link to the 1.3 update and revert back. You can read more about it and get the links to the 1.3 update here. Gotta love software updates

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It’s time to wrap up another week with a tip and some other stuff.

First off, Jason D.Moore posted a Photoshop tutorial on his website on how to create the cover to my Layers book. I thought it was cool to see. Here’s the link.
(FYI… the Layers book made it in the top 200 of all books on Amazon again. Thanks everyone!)

Also, there’s a fairly in depth review of my Layers book over at www.photographyandthemac.com. It goes into specifics a little more, so if you’re still on the fence it may help out.

Finally, the tip of the week. If you’re a preset freak then your presets panel in Lightroom is probably becoming pretty chaotic. I have two suggestions:
1) Join a program that’s dedicated to treating your illness - the CPFAT (the Center for Preset Freaks Abuse and Treatment). Here’s the link.

2) Create folders to hold the presets in a more organized way. To do this, just right click in the Presets panel and select New Folder. Give it a descriptive name (”Matt’s Presets”, or “Special Effects”). Then just drag the presets you want into that folder directly in the Presets panel. That’s it. It’s a really quick and easy way to organize all those presets.

Alright, that wraps up the week in Lightroom. Check out the next post for some quick Lightroom and Camera Raw update news and have a great weekend.

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Just wanted to let you know there’s a new Lightroom update out there. We’re up to 1.4. Here’s the low-down:
1) It’s mostly camera related, meaning the main update just adds support for some new cameras - no new features.
2) There’s also a couple of bug fixes included.
3) For Mac users there’s some legacy printer driver stuff included.

Anyway, it’s nothing earth shattering and, as I mentioned earlier, there’s no new features. But it’s always good to keep the software up to date. If Lightroom hasn’t prompted you already (it did for me when I launched it today) then click here to get the update and find out more.

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Last week I posted a video about importing and the folder structure that I use. Lots of other ideas spawned off of it and this video is one of them (but there’s more to come). So let’s say you have a folder structure and import system that really works for you now. But you’ve also got lots of photos from the past when you didn’t use the folder structure you do now. What do you do with them? Do you have to delete and reimport? Nope. There’s a much easier way and we’ll take a look at it in this video.

Click here to watch the video. (12Mb)

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