One Willow Lightroom Presets- Step by Step

This tutorial will take you through the steps of how I apply One Willow Presets to my RAW images in Lightroom.

This beautiful photo was captured during one of my recent commercial photo-shoots for Wild Olive Tees.  The photo posted below is SOOC (straight out of camera) and captured as a RAW file.  You can see that although the exposure and focus are lovely the photo is dull and drab as a RAW file.

The very first step I do with my RAW file is to make sure the exposure is adjusted.  The image looked good to me and was exposed to my preference so I did not need to make an exposure adjustment. So, while in the Develop mode of Lightroom and using my Navigation panel (on upper-left panel of my Lightroom screen) I will scroll through the various presets (using my cursor arrow and watching the navigation display screen as I scroll) until I decide upon the preset that best suites this image.  For this image I chose the Promise preset from The Beautiful Things Collection. After deciding, click the preset to apply it.

I loved the toning and boost the Promise Preset gave this image but I felt it was still a bit on the cool side and had more of a pink tint than I would prefer.  I also felt that it needed more definition and depth so I made these super quick adjustments to the preset using the Basic panel.  Temp- towards warm; Tint- towards green; blacks- slide to right to increase; contrast- slide to right to increase; recovery slide to right- to recover blown highlights. The below images show the adjustments and the full version after the adjustments were made.

I also felt the blues that were a bit bold on the blacktop shadow (but liked the addition of the color) so I made a saturation adjustment to the blues in the HSL Panel pulling the to the left to decrease saturation.  (this preset contains a blue saturation increase)

My final touches to this image were to use the One Willow Portrait Brushes to provide a few portrait enhancements (more about those later) and to reduce noise and sharpen.  To reduce image noise I applied the One Willow Post- Reduce Noise II from the Beautiful Things Collection (this layers on top of the Lightroom preset) and sharpened to taste using the sharpening sliders.

At last, the before/after…

and the final image exported out of Lightroom (sized for web) and watermarked in PS.  Ta Da! Amazingly fast!

 

3 Comments Left

1. Stephanie Tait - Captured by S. Tait says:

   November 7, 2011 at 1:15 pm

   Oh my goodness, did Inread this correctly – are you developing a set of BRUSHES? My excitement over this potential development is pretty high right now

   And this demonstration was wonderful. Thanks!

2. Cindy Bryant says:

   November 7, 2011 at 11:31 pm

   Hi Jessica,

   I want to just say thank you very much for putting together this how go preset tutorial. It’s very helpful!

   Just wondering if you have any suggestions where it’s a good between range to keep the noise reduction luminance slider, and same for the sharpening mask slider (ie.. Between 30-70) considering you know your presets best, I wondered if you could offer tips on ranges to stay within in sharpening and noise reduction sections.

   Thank you for your help!
   PS. I’m still practicing how to make the overall image look natural.

3. Lindsey Martin says:

   January 11, 2012 at 1:16 pm

   Thank you! I really LOVE sharp images…but not sure how in LR! Thank you and I can’t wait to attempt this:)