Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

It’s Tuesday and I’m in New York City teaching Lightroom at B&H Photo. I had two jam packed classes yesterday and lot’s of blog readers came by to say hi. If you’re around today make sure you stop in and introduce yourself.

Anyway, on to the preset… this week I’ve got something really different for you. Instead of giving you free presets to download I’m going to let you make your own web presets (I know, I’m very generous today) However, ever though you’ll be making your own presets I’ll give you the tools to do it with to come up with some pretty sweet looking web galleries. See, one of the things people have the biggest problems with is figuring out which colors will look good for custom web galleries. Sure, you can choose the default black template in the Web module in Lightroom and be done with it. But what do you do if you want to be creative with some of the colors and you just don’t know where to start? Well, you can use Adobe Kuler (a free web application) to find some really great color combinations and then input them into the Web module. It works like this:

1) Go to kuler.adobe.com. Start searching through the website for color combinations you like. You can create your own or just click on Most Popular to see some good ideas.

2) Once you find the one you like click on it to select it. Then you’ll see 3 small icons under it. Click on the rightmost icon (the sliders) to make changes to the color settings.

3) Instead of changing the colors, just read the RGB color values for each color and write them down.

4) Go into Lightroom’s Web module. Scroll down to the Color Palette panel on the right.

5) Click on the Background, Cells, Rollover, Grid Lines, and Text color swatches and enter in the color values you took from Kuler.

Here’s a sample I made from the Kuler combination called “Quite Cry”.

It’s pretty cool how you can come up with some really amazing color combinations and make some totally different (yet nice looking) web galleries with color combinations from Kuler. Give it a try… (lame joke alert - very lame attempt at humor coming)… It’s Kule! I hope you enjoy and make sure you share your favorite Kuler preset name or color combos in the comments here. See ya!

It’s time for another preset day and I thought I’d give away a brand new one that I’ve been working on. This preset is the one I apply to my photos as I’m importing them. Now, if you’ve watched any of my earlier Lightroom videos (from earlier in 2007) you may recall that I never applied a preset to my photos as I imported them. That’s changed as of late. I’ve been working on this preset and I’ve had some really good results from it. Here’s how to use it:

When you import your photos there’s a section in the Import dialog that allows you to apply a preset. Once you add this preset to your Develop module presets, it’ll appear there and you can select/apply it on import automatically.

A few things to note:
• This preset works great on just about everything I threw it at. However, realize that the Auto settings that it uses tend to overexpose the photo sometimes. Not all the time, but I found some of the photos a bit bright after it was applied (especially portraits and studio work). If that happens, the first thing you can do is adjust the Exposure setting and bring it down a little.
• Just because you applied an auto adjustment preset when you imported doesn’t mean you’re done. It’s a starting point, so you’ll definitely have to do some adjustments after.

I hope you enjoy it. Make sure you let us know what you think by leaving a comment.

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt’s Auto Adjustment Preset
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

Happy Tuesday everyone! I’ve got a brand new set of presets for you this week targetted directly at blue skys (or lack of). Here’s the deal: There’s 3 different presets in this one each making the sky a deeper blue. Go ahead and develop your photo first (Exposure, Recovery, etc…) and then apply this preset. But there’s a couple of things to note:
1) You’ve got to have some degree of blue in your sky for this to work. Don’t think you can hit a gray overcast sky with this preset and turn it blue. It’s got to be somewhat blue to start with.
2) Anything else that’s blue in the photo is going to be affected so watch out if you’ve got people in there (Thanks Dave Alton for mentioning this in the comments)
3) Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Meaning, your sky may be just fine to start with. These presets will really bring out the blues and if you use them (especially Level 3) on a sky that is already pretty blue it’s going to look fake.
Sound good? Well, I hope you have a great day. Enjoy the presets and, as always, let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt’s Deep Blue Sky presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

It’s funny how things happen sometimes. Just when I was trying to decide which preset I would share this week I got a email from some one asking how I accomplished that gritty/HDR-looking/surreal/dramatic effect. If you recall from a while ago I had made a video on this technique and it became wildly popular. Well, I went to point them to this website to download the preset and realized I never did a preset for this technique (insert light bulb above head sound and graphic here). So that’s what you’ve got this week.

Here’s the low-down on the specifics of the presets in this bundle. There’s 4 of them in total ranging from light to really dark. Because of the nature of this preset I had to adjust the Exposure and Blacks settings but feel free to adjust them after you apply if needed (try watching the video link above for some ideas). You’ll find most of your changes will revolve in those two settings to either lighten the photo or enhance the blacks more. Personally, I find myself going for the dark or really dark versions but every once in a while the light one works great too.

As usual, please let everyone know in the comments what you think and if you have any other suggestions for this one, or if you find another setting that works well. Thanks everybody!

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt’s Surreal Edgy Effect presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

Good morning everyone. I’m back from Photoshop World and I had an absolute blast. It was the funnest/most tiring week I’ve had in a long time. I’ve got some presets for you so feel free to scroll down but first a couple of quick news bites.

NewsTerry White wrote a quick review of my Layers book over at his Tech Blog site. I’m really excited to say that the Layers book was a total hit last week at Photoshop World. I had no less then 100 people ask me to sign it and it was an honor each time. Thanks to everyone who came up. Anyway, as much as this is a chance to plug my Layers book (you know I love those ), it’s also a chance to send people to Terry’s Tech blog because he gives the flat-out best tech advice out there.

Lightroom 2 Beta was announced last week (see previous post) and I got a ton of question both here at the blog, and at Photoshop World. Tomorrow (which could be Wednesday… or not) I’m going to post a Q&A to answer them all.

PresetsNow for the presets. This is one that I’ve had an idea floating around about for a while. It’s a black and white preset but it’s primarily meant for outdoor photos. They could contain people, animals, mountains, trees or whatever but there’s one key ingredient that they must have - skies. These presets target the sky and give you three different choices: light, medium, or dark. So you can push your skies toward white, a medium grayish color, or get dark skies if you’d like.

Well I’m about to dig myself out of email-inbox-hell after it piling up for a week. Make sure you stop back tomorrow for the Lightroom 2.0 Q&A session. Have a great one!

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt’s Blue Sky B&W presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.