THE PROS AND CONS OF PRESETS

Wether you are an amateur of professional photographer, you all heard about presets for sure. You have already seen advertisements from other photographers or companies to buy presets to apply different styles, colour grading to your photos by the click of the mouse button. In this blog we dive deeper into the world of presets, discuss the pros and cons and wether you need to buy presets or not.

What are presets?

Just in case, for anyone who isn’t up to speed with presets, I’ll explain briefly what presets are.

When editing a photo in the software, let’s say Lightroom or Capture One, you will move sliders to modify exposure, brightness, contrast, colours and so on. You can do that for each photo individually, copy this manually or create a preset.

A preset will save the modifications that you apply on the primary photo into a configuration that you can reuse on other photos. Very useful when you have to work in batch of photos from for example a wedding or when you do a series of photos. With a preset you can apply those modifications directly onto all of your photos in batch without modifying each photo individually.

Various presets applied to a single photo.

Presets in your workflow

As already mentioned, wedding photographers for example will take many photos during the day and make a selection before editing the photos. But after the initial culling, you still end up with a few hundred photos that can be delivered to your client and needs further processing.

In the past, when I was a wedding photographer, I used presets as well to give my photos a certain look and feel. I applied the preset before doing anything else on the photo. After the preset was set, each photo was individually inspected and modified.

By using a preset you can quickly apply changes on your selected photos and lay the groundwork for your style. You could say it is a time saver. Up to a certain level.

Preset don’t always work on each photo

Let’s continue to take a wedding shoot as example. During the day, light will not always be the same. Your photos will varies on exposure etc and not be equally bright when viewed on the screen.

When you apply a preset, it will modify the photo but doesn’t take into account that some photos are taken with a bright sun while others are taken during an indoor reception for example.

So when applying presets, your photo will change but might still need some work on exposure, brightness and other values. Presets will not put all your photos on the same level of exposure or make hem equally bright and consistent.

The pros

• Presets can speed up your workflow and make dull repetitive changes very easy to apply.

• A preset that changes the sharpness, clarity,…. may help you defining and adding to you style over multiple photos with a single click.

• Ideal for batch processing many photos where exposure and brightness are more or less consistent.

The cons

• When your preset modifies exposure, contrast, brightness, highlights, shadows,…. main settings in other words, not every photo will look equally good and needs individual tweaks and corrections. Make sure to check each individual image when your preset changes the main settings of your photo.

• Presets don’t always work good on batch photos where exposure and brightness varies a lot so individual corrections may apply.

• Presets can make you lazy. What I mean is that it might be possible that your style doesn’t evolve any more over the years and you will always use the same preset instead of exploring new settings or ways to grow in your work.

Should I buy presets?

My recommendation is for sure and without hesitation a no. You don’t have to spend money on presets.

Various photographers offer presets, even with a heavy discount or in special limited promotions, as is often the case. Or they offer more than 30 or 50 or 100 presets in a package.

This is pure marketing to get their sales and revenue up. And most of the time you only need one or a few presets so buying packages is a waste of money to be honest.

In fact, you have everything in front of you to create your own presets.

I would recommend not to change the exposure, brightness,… and some other main values that will change with each photo and where you have no control off.

I should focus on modifications that provide the core of your own style like for example slight colour grading, applying some sharpening, changing clarity and other non intrusive settings.

Spend time in figuring out what works best for you. Try to apply your own style to a few photos, take notes on what you do with each photo and create your own presets that you can reuse.

It will be yours and yours alone. It is something personal and represents your work, your view, your vision. It will contribute to your business and add value to your branding.