Basic Photo Edits Presets / Actions

Description

These are my go-to edits for every photo I process! Use them to make easy tweaks to the brightness, contrast, and temperature of your straight out of the camera (SOOC) photos. Sometimes the camera just doesn’t see what your eye sees, and as a result, you need to give your images a bit of a nudge. Particularly if you are working with RAW files – they can be quite flat and dull, SOOC. Choose from two formats: Lightroom presets and Photoshop actions

Lightroom Presets

The Lightroom pack includes the following eight basic edits:

• Better (My favorite – often fixes SOOC images with just one click!)
• Brighten + Pop 1 (Bright)
• Brighten + Pop 2 (Brighter)
• Brighten + Pop 3 (Brightest!)
• Brighter (No “pop” in this one)
• Darker (Brings back some of the detail in those blown-out images)
• Warmer
• Cooler

Plus, I’ve added three bonus “Clear” presets for getting you back to various starting points, if you don’t like the way an edit is headed.

Photoshop Actions

The Photoshop pack is slightly different, but contains all of the same functionality:

• Better
• Brighten + Pop (Highly configurable single action gets you from Bright to Unbelievably Bright)
• Brighter
• Darker
• Warmer
• Cooler

Every Action is self-contained in either a single layer or a single group of layers, leaving the base image untouched. As a result, it’s easy to hide or delete the results of any action you don’t like without changing the original image.

The Role of Basic Edits

Sometimes I like to add vintagey color effects to my images, but before I do, I always get them to a nice, clean, well-exposed state first. These presets/actions are a big part of that. Naturally, not every preset will work with every image, and not every image responds well to presets. But I find that the “Better” preset is always a good starting point. Sometimes I add others after that, and sometimes I fiddle directly with the Develop settings (in LR) or Adjustment Layers (in PS). Of course, it’s all part of the fun!

Requirements

There are two versions of this collection available: one for Lightroom users, and one for Photoshop users. Each flavor of each collection was tested using the most recent Creative Cloud update as of this writing (version is in parenthesis).

Lightroom Presets work in the current versions of:

• Adobe Lightroom Classic CC (7.4)
• Lightroom CC (1.4)
• Camera Raw CC (10.4)

Photoshop Actions work in the current version of:

• Adobe Photoshop CC (19.1.5)

Please make sure you get your collection(s) in the correct flavor!