Presets are a terrific way to give your images a creative kickstart in any photo editor. You get a wide choice with Adobe Lightroom, for example, but a whole lot more variety in programs like the DxO Nik Collection and ON1 Photo RAW/Effects. Presets combine settings and adjustments for specific visual ‘looks’, and you can check and modify the settings to customise the effect yourself.
Analog Efex Pro, part of the DxO Nik Collection, has some great vintage film effect presets, but you don’t have to use them exactly as they are provided. It’s very easy to customise and adapt these presets to give exactly the kind of look you want.
You can learn a lot from experimenting with manual adjustments and individual filters in a program like Color Efex Pro, but you can learn even more by dismantling a preset to see how its individual parts work together.
Preset Picks: The SN-04 Style from Capture One’s Seasonal Style pack (sold separately) has a very rich, warm look. Here’s how the Style is created.
Capture One lets you save adjustments for re-use in the future, but it can be confusing because it offers user ‘presets’ and user ‘styles’ without being terribly clear about the difference. In other programs, ‘presets’ usually refer to sets of adjustments applied all at once, but Capture One presets are subtly different. So to make…
Analog Efex Pro is one of the plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection. It comes with a selection of preset camera and film effects to reproduce the look of traditional analog photography, but I’ve been spending some time trying them out and using the Analog Efex Pro Camera Kit (see part 2 of this Analog…
Lightroom doesn’t directly edit your original photos, so even though your pictures look different in Lightroom when you edit them, these adjustments exist only within Lightroom. If you want to send an edited version to someone else or for use on a website, for example, you need to ‘Export’ a new version of the picture…
Nik Software HDR Efex Pro 2 is now part of the DxO Nik Collection, but the software itself is unchanged – it remains one of the most approachable and most effective HDR tools you can get. But while the bundled HDR Efex Pro 2 presets are many and varied, you can also create and save…