New Lightroom Presets Coming Soon
I’m delighted to share some information about a project I’ve been working on for a little while. As long time readers might know, I used to have a selection of Lightroom presets available back when I ran my own download store. Since I closed that in favour of selling on Gumroad, I have only really kept my black and white presets, T-Pan available. I had wanted to bring some of my other presets back for sale again, but when I looked at them I realised that many of them were quite dated. I started by looking to see if I could bring some of these old presets up to date, but I ended up with an entirely new set!
Of all my previous presets, the one range I did really want to look at though was my “FilmLUX” presets, as these are ones I still use myself, and I was quite proud of them at the time. At first, I was just going to update these to the newer Lightroom format, create a new read me, and just bring the old series back as a single set (there were three volumes of the “old” FilmLUX) but instead, I decided to do a sort of “best of” collection. At least that’s how it started. Once I got into it, what had begun as a compilation of my favourite presets from the old series quickly turned into an entirely new set and all new presets.
Brighton Pier - With FilmLUX Classic Applied. Click to view Large
The reason for this is that Lightroom has changed a lot since I last put out a FilmLUX set. There are a lot of new tools and a lot of different ways of doing things. My way of working with the software has changed too, and so as I went through the old versions, and tried to update them, they quickly began morphing into something new altogether. I used the old set as “inspiration” but re-created them almost from scratch.
The new set is called FilmLUX Classic (work in progress title - this may change). It was based on my favourite “negative” looks from the old series, but they’re now quite different. I’m actually quite happy with them, and I’ve put a lot of work into developing the presets. The set consists of 10 looks “inspired” by film but not trying to directly emulate any particular film stock. There are two standard variations of each film Look, and a third version specifically for Fujifilm shooters (specifically for X-Trans 4 or later - as they use the classic negative stock.)
In addition the set comes with an innovative (if I do say so myself) set of tools, some of which make full use of the masking tools in Lightroom for some cool effects, such as an optical glow effect, or a smart vignette which keeps the subject from being darkened. There’s also some smart grads which use a similar trick.
The collection is more or less complete. I just have to do some final testing and write the documentation to go with it and then I will have it up for sale on my GumRoad store.
But wait - there’s more! I’m, also working on an entirely new set which is tentatively called “FilmLUX 24”. These are all new looks inspired by real film stocks, and based on shooting actual film. I have these nearly complete, but I’m still doing some tweaking. These include some negative looks as well as “digital versions” for those who just want the colour grade, but without the overall “film look”. I don’t have a release date for these yet, but I hope to have them fairly soon.
I had actually gone back and forward as to whether or not to release these. I think we reached “peak preset” a while ago now and they aren’t really in demand any more. There’s also many sites which are flooding the market with cheap presets either thrown together or “borrowed” from others. Unfortunately there is no way to protect your presets from being copied.
It’s a lot of work creating these. Some people seem to think it’s just a matter of playing around with some sliders and saving the results and thats that. But there is a lot more to it than that. For a start, what works for one camera might not work with another, so you have to test across raw files from multiple cameras. The more the better. The same is true for different image types. What works of one might not work for another, and so you have to test on a wide variety of images. You test, tweak, test again, and tweak again until you finally get something that work as on a wide variety of images. Then you have to write guidelines and package everything up. So while I was sceptical about the success, I wanted to put these out there because I think they’re good, even if I never make any money off them.
Anyway, I hope to have FilmLUX classic out within the next week or so, and FilmLUX 24 within the next month. I’ll have some more news about upcoming products and projects soon, now that I’m getting back into it. Sort of. But more on that later!
