Lightroom Presets, Templates, and Plug-ins

by Steve Eshom

As I’ve mentioned before I really like Lightroom.  As a software package it provides most of what I need to organize and edit my photos.   For those things that LR wasn’t designed to do naively Adobe provided a method for developers to construct their own export plug-ins to fill in the gaps.  LR was also constructed so develop module edits can be saved as a preset and web and slideshow outputs can be customized using templates.  I believe this flexibility will be one of the key factors to LR’s long term success (and potentially some smart developers )

I’ve started using a couple of presets and plug-ins that I’ve found useful.  With presets the field is long and wide since they are easily created out of Lightroom (click the + next to presets and choose the develop options to save) and quite a few photographers have published their presets on their websites.  Do a Google search on ‘Lightroom Presets’ and you’ll see what I mean.  Just because the field is so large doesn’t diminish the fact that this is fabulous ability it just shows that photographers want to share their skills.

Plug-ins and templates are a bit more challenging because they require external development work and testing so the field is a bit more limited.  Despite this barrier the two plug-ins I use most LR/Mogrify (export tools) and LR/Enfuse (HDR) are quite powerful and really add a lot to the basic export features of LR.   Web and slideshow templates are an area I haven’t delved into too much yet though I’m carefully watching some very intriguing web gallery and slideshow tools.  I’m hoping to take advantage of these for my gallery sometime in the future.

This photograph of a northbound BNSF Manifest at Steilacoom was made with LR/Enfuse.  The first photo was edited to maximize the exposure on the mid and foreground.  The second photo was edited to maximize the expose on the sky and background.  LR/Enfuse then combined the two to increase the dynamic range of the image to provide a better appearance in the highlight areas which weren’t the main focus of the original exposure.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm and is filed under photo technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.