Knowing how to do things and knowing WHAT to do are two different things
You’ll find no shortage of tutorials on how to achieve certain photo editing effects in different editors, but very little on which direction to take your images. It’s all ‘how’ and no ‘why’. That’s why I rate software like the Nik Collection and ON1 Photo RAW so highly. They don’t just give you tools, they give you ideas.
This is one of the hardest things about photography in general and photo editing in particular. There’s this assumption that you already know exactly what your image needs to make it work, and all the emphasis is on the tools you need to achieve that. It’s as if we can take our imagination for granted.
Well I don’t know about you, but I find my imagination is not some kind of bottomless well I can draw on at will. It’s a fickle thing. Some days it hardly works at all, while on other days it will lead me down paths I’ve already trodden too often in the past. The imagination is a wonderful thing, but it only knows what it knows.
People used to say of Photoshop that if you can think it, you can make it. And so you can, but it’s thinking of things in the first place that’s the hard part.
Which is why I keep turning to the Nik Collection or ON1 Photo RAW/Effects, because each one has a huge library of presets that do things with my images that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own.
The main image for this post shows one image re-imagined twelve different ways in Analog Efex. I might have t thought of a few of these on my own, but I might never have imagined the potential of all the others if I had’t been able to scan through a whole set of thumbnail previews. Very often, an effect I think won’t work is brilliant in combination with others, or I see tools being used that I would never have thought of that look amazing.
You can’t always predict what’s going to look ‘right’. Sometimes a distressed vintage look works brilliantly with an image, sometimes it’s a hard-contrast black and white look. Sometimes when you’re working on a set of images as part of a photo story or personal photo, a preset can provide a perfectly matched linking theme for the whole set.
As photographers we like to think we’re creative and inventive – and so we are. But sometimes it’s good to get ideas from outside your own head, and that’s what creative presets provide.
