[ Postcard from Caledonia ]

I am a big fan of the Lightroom Preset model. It was one of the reasons I switched over from Apple’s Aperture. In one click you can apply a series of develop settings to one or multiple images, making your workflow extremely efficient.

There is also the artistic side of Lightroom presets. A number of vendors and fellow enthusiasts have found some “secret sauce” settings to save as presets which give some really nice effects.

But what do you do if you purchase or download a free preset that doesn’t quite give you the effect you require?

For instance, I am a user of Gavin Seim’s Power Workflow Presets for Lightroom. I really like one particular effect but would like to reduce the Black level that is applied. Perhaps in your case you find a preset adds too much saturation, too little vibrancy, or it does an auto white balance which you don’t like. Well surely it’s easy to fix? - you simply fine tune the develop settings and save it as a new preset. Well you could but how do you know what actual settings are contained within that preset?

An example

To illustrate what I mean, open up an image in Lightroom, create a new virtual copy, switch to Develop mode and apply the built-in “Creative-Sepia” preset. Now, what if you decide you prefer a darker sepia tone? Ok, now go to the Split Toning section of the develop module and move the Highlights Saturation slider up to 60.

Let’s assume that this is the level of sepia tone you prefer and you now want to save that as your own version of the preset. So go over to the Presets list on the left hand side of your screen and click the “+” sign to add a new preset. Give it a name of “My Sepia Tone”, set the folder to User Presets or any other preset folder you prefer - but wait. What “Settings” options do you tick? Well that’s easy isn’t it, we changed a Split Toning parameter so we’ll just tick that. So make sure that is the only “settings” option that is ticked, then click “Create”. A new Preset option will appear in your list of presets in the folder you saved it to.

Now let’s test our preset - go back to your original image (i.e. before you created a new virtual copy) - now create a new virtual copy and apply your new “My Sepia” preset. Not quite what you expected is it. This is where fine tuning presets can get a bit frustrating. Now some of you may be saying that the answer to this is to check all Settings options when creating a preset or adapting an existing one. Well sure that will work, but in the process you may be carrying over settings that you don’t want applied and weren’t in the original preset.

So how do I know what a preset actually contains?

Well this is where you have to delve below the surface of Lightroom and into the file system where Lightroom stores its presets.

Let’s take that original “Creative-Sepia” preset and generate a new copy of it. To do this, right-click on the Preset and select the “Export” option. This will save the preset to a new file. In this case let’s save it to our Desktop. You should now have a file on your desktop called “Creative-Sepia.lrtemplate”. If you now open this file with either Notepad in Windows or TextEdit on the Mac you will suddenly expose the internals of the preset.

The preset template file should look something similar to this:-

s = {
internalName = “Creative - Sepia”,
title = “Creative - Sepia”,
type = “Develop”,
value = {
settings = {
AutoBrightness = false,
AutoContrast = false,
AutoExposure = false,
AutoGrayscaleMix = false,
AutoShadows = false,
AutoTone = false,
BlueHue = 0,
BlueSaturation = 0,
Brightness = 50,
CameraProfile = “ACR 2.4″,
ChromaticAberrationB = 0,
ChromaticAberrationR = 0,
ColorNoiseReduction = 25,
Contrast = 25,
ConvertToGrayscale = true,
Exposure = 0,
FillLight = 26,
GrayMixerAqua = -10,
GrayMixerBlue = 20,
GrayMixerGreen = -17,
GrayMixerMagenta = 32,
GrayMixerOrange = 12,
GrayMixerPurple = 25,
GrayMixerRed = 39,
GrayMixerYellow = -9,
GreenHue = 0,
GreenSaturation = 0,
HighlightRecovery = 0,
HueAdjustmentAqua = 0,
HueAdjustmentBlue = 0,
HueAdjustmentGreen = 0,
HueAdjustmentMagenta = 0,
HueAdjustmentOrange = 0,
HueAdjustmentPurple = 0,
HueAdjustmentRed = 0,
HueAdjustmentYellow = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentAqua = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentBlue = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentGreen = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentMagenta = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentOrange = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentPurple = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentRed = 0,
LuminanceAdjustmentYellow = 0,
LuminanceSmoothing = 0,
ParametricDarks = -17,
ParametricHighlights = 0,
ParametricLights = 28,
ParametricShadows = 0,
RedHue = 0,
RedSaturation = 0,
Saturation = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentAqua = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentBlue = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentGreen = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentMagenta = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentOrange = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentPurple = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentRed = 0,
SaturationAdjustmentYellow = 0,
ShadowTint = 0,
Shadows = 2,
Sharpness = 25,
SplitToningHighlightHue = 51,
SplitToningHighlightSaturation = 22,
SplitToningShadowHue = 37,
SplitToningShadowSaturation = 32,
Temperature = 5550,
Tint = -4,
ToneCurve = {
0,
0,
32,
22,
64,
56,
128,
128,
192,
196,
255,
255,
},
Vibrance = 0,
VignetteAmount = 0,
VignetteMidpoint = 50,
WhiteBalance = “Custom”,
},

},
version = 0,
}

We can now clearly see every specific parameter that is stored in that preset. Each line matches a slider or parameter on the Develop screen. Only those altered by the preset are included in this file. It is fairly easy to decode what setting refers to which slider. So I could print this out and gradually apply each step and see the effect building up and decode the “secret sauce”. If I then want to tweak any settings, I now know what settings within the develop module were actually used and what to save within any new preset.

Taking it a step further

If you are comfortable editing files you can even directly edit the numeric parameters within the file. For example to get the sepia tone I wanted, I would edit the line “SplitToningHighlightSaturation = 22″ and change the 22 to a 60. Then I could save the file (being careful to keep it a plain text file), and import it as a brand new preset with my own fine-tuning and all other original settings remaining intact.

So you can now decode and tweak your presets safe in the knowledge you are only applying the develop settings that are relevant.