• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

Personal style and workflow getting back to basics

Status
Not open for further replies.

RobOK

Active Member
Joined
May 20, 2008
Messages
195
Location
Arlington, VA
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Classic latest version
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.13 High Sierra
  2. iOS
I have been long time Lightroom user for enthusiast travel, personal, and a little street photography. I have too many presets, some my own, some bought, and some free. Now camera profiles are in the mix. Mostly I shoot Nikon (Df and D750) but also Fuji X100f and Sony. For a while I had a style of contrasty, bold colors but hopefully not over saturated. I experimented with some film emulation. Workflow I had introduced PhotoMechanic but now with LR speed improvements I don’t always use it. Of course mobile now comes into play. All of this is over many years, I’m not changing every month.

I want to get back to basics. Clean out presets, streamline workflow. Simplify.

Has anyone gone through similar, feeling overwhelmed?

Open to any discussion that comes to mind!

Rob.
 
I realize this is an open ended post... so to tune in:

* How are people working Profiles into their workflow
* How has your personal style changed over time and do you use Presets to drive that?
* Have you moved in and out of styles, say Film Emulation?

Thoughts on how Profiles will evolve?

Thanks,
Rob.
 
Hi Rob

The only presets I use are for sharpening and noise reduction - and these are tightly coupled to specific lenses and specific ISO's.
Otherwise each image is "hand-crafted" so to speak.
I don't get excited about camera profiles.

Yes I think my approach and style has evolved and still continues to evolve.
I tend to look at other people's photography all the time for inspiration but I am not interested specifically in their post-processing but rather what they were doing with camera in hand...

What you will eventually realise is that distinctive style in photography is centred on the camera and not in post-processing. Post-processing (whether one uses presets or not) should be a natural extension of what was captured in-camera not an attempt to synthesise something that was never there in the first place...
Artistic intent plays a big role here since this has nothing, necessarily, to do with how a raw image looks as it initially presents itself in the Develop module, but what I saw at the time of shooting and what I was trying to capture. The honest truth is that all too often what I actually shot fails to capture my intent and so that image, even if a "good" one by some standard of reckoning, is still a fail...

Photography, of necessity, has to start with what is captured in-camera. What happens subsequently in post-processing is consequent and therefore subordinate to the in-camera process.
For me personally my ability to post-process is not where the limitations lie - it is in capturing in-camera what my eye saw and what my heart felt...

Tony Jay
 
Great reply Tony, I agree with what you wrote. My post was more about post, but of course the eye and vision is paramount. And, of course, putting yourself in front of interesting things to shoot!

My post was more focused on post since this is a LR forum.

I appreciate you sharing, it was a good reminder!

Rob.
 
I too spent time deciding on/adjusting my style and accumulated many Presets along the way. I now just use a couple as a starting point for further editing so I just went through and deleted all the ones I no longer needed.

Also LR has a lot of presets that ship with the program (which you will probably never use). You can hide these by clicking on the "+" (add new presets) button and selecting Manage Presets.
 
Great question Rob. And yes, I think most people have gone through that stage... or will do as they grow.

For deciding your style going forward, a suggestion... look through your existing photos and pick out the ones you like best, maybe adding them to the quick collection. You could look round other people's photos too, grabbing the ones you particularly like.

When you've finished collecting photos you like, look back through that collection and spot the patterns. You'll probably find there are significant similarities, for example, most of the ones you like have great shadow detail and they're not overly saturated, or they mostly have a vignette, or there's a particular film effect you've often used, or something like that.

Use those findings to select your favorite profile and build a preset that will make most of your photos look great. That doesn't mean you won't sometimes do something different, but it'll be a good starting point for your editing and will help you start to gain your own distinctive style.
 
Thanks for the replies on personal style... I am returning to this post having to process a big batch of photos from NYC. I am still getting used to the concept of Profiles (Creative, Camera ones I understand). Have people taken to the Artistic and/or Modern profiles? I see the power in them but it feels like another layer of things to learn and apply.

Thoughts?
 
... Have people taken to the Artistic and/or Modern profiles? I see the power in them but it feels like another layer of things to learn and apply.
Thoughts?

The simple answer for me is no. I tend to use Adobe Color as a main starting point, and occasionally Adobe Landscape.
I generally have some sort of vision on how something should look, so I just use the regular LR tools to get me there.
When I want something enhanced - and it generally is only selected sections of a photo - I will send it into Photoshop and work on masked layers there.
I will often blend these layers, changing their opacity after I let the photo mature a bit over time. I rarely get it right the first time through.
 
I changed my import settings so my preferred camera-matching profile would be applied to all my new photos instead of the default Adobe profile. So, for my Olympus camera, the Camera Natural profile is applied by default now. It's a better starting point for post-processing in my opinion. I sometimes change the profile to Adobe Landscape in post, though. I don't use any presets.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top