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- Oct 7, 2007
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To aid users in selecting the right look for their landscape images, I've created a set of over 7' Graduated filter presets to get you started with making creative choices for your images. Covering both landscape and portrait orienations, as well as hard and soft line filters, these filters come in 3 standard colours: ND (Grey), Blue and Tobacco. As is also standard, they come in strengths of 1 stop ('.3), 2 stops ('.6) and 3 stops ('.9). It was a bit of work to create this, but I'm not charging a whole lot for them, just €5.''. Obviously you can tweak the settings once applied. In fact I positively encourage it!
Why should you pay for these, when you could create them yourself? Well the fact that it takes a bunch of time to put them together is the best reason. Probably more than €5 of your time. Also by running down through the Presets panel on the left of Develop, you can preview them quickly to see how they look with your image. Much quicker than mucking around with sliders.
You can see some of the presets in sample form here: Download Sample Grads
To install these presets, drop the Sample Grads folder into:
User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets on OS X,
C
ocuments and SettingsUserApplication DataAdobeLightroomDevelop Presets on XP-Note that Application Data is a hidden folder, C:UsersUserAppDataRoamingAdobeLightroomDevelop Presets on Vista,
where User is your login name.
Or you can click on Preferences>Presets>Show Lightroom Presets Folders to open the Presets folder in Finder/Explorer. Then open the Develop Presets folder from there.
The full version folder contains 6 Sub folders, place these folders in the Develop Preset location mentioned above.
You can also Right click on a preset or folder and import them from within Develop, which is fine for a small amount of presets, but for folders, manually placing them and restarting Lightroom is quicker.
The 4 folders are:
Grads: Hard-Landscape
Grads: Hard-Portrait
Grads: Hard-Portrait2
Grads: Soft-Landscape
Grads: Soft-Portrait
Grads: Soft-Portrait2
ard Grads have a tight transition, while the Soft Grads use a wider transition. Landscape and Portrait Grads need to be separate as they don't rotate. The 3 colours (ND, Blue and Tobacco) come in 1, 2, and 3 stops varieties, equivalent to '.3, '.6 and '.9 in standard filter terminology. Also as most Landscape photographers use the Rule of Thirds to compose, each type is set on the bottom and top third, allowing you to choose the nearest one quickly. To change the filter, click on the pin to select it (Press M to activate Grad Filter in Develop, if it's not open). Drag the pin to move the centre of the grad, and the outside lines to make it softer or harder. Finally click the colour chip to change the tint. The Blue and Tobacco colours I've chosen are simply ones I like. You may prefer a redder Tobacco, or different blue. Actually then ones I have look similar to the Cokin set I own, so I was trying to get close to them. The Tint adds to the current colour, but you can alternate this by reducing or increasing the saturation slider value on the Pin.
Due to the way Lightroom handles rotation, you need a different set of filters if you shoot shutter button down, rather than up. For those users, I've added a further set of soft and hard grads to the download.
To Download, add them to the cart. Payment is Paypal via E-junkie, but can also take Credit Card. Once Paypal sends notification, an email will be sent with a download code.
The download is a Zip file, from an email link. It's zipped with BetterZip to remove Mac hidden files and be more PC compatible.
To make a purchase go to my product page or my Lightroom Blog post. For support, use this post or the blog post.
Please note that this uses feature available in Lightroom 2 only.
Update: Version 2 Update: Version 2 of the LRB Grads contains an extra folder of Sunset filters, along with a middle filter for each of the types and strengths.
There are 2 zips in the archive: One with the original Colour Strength Position naming, and one with the new form Position Colour Strength.
The new version makes for quicker previewing in the Navigator.
To install the new filters right click on a preset and click Show in Finder/Explorer. If you are updating and want to use the new names, delete the older presets first. Delete the LRB Grads folders (there are 6 in V1).
Unzip the file gradsV2newnames.zip file in this folder for the new names, or gradsV2original.zip for the original naming scheme. Restart Lightroom.
Update: Version 3 adds some Tilt Shift filters.
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