Lightroom portrait presets
When you take a portrait of someone, you are not just taking a mug shot or a school picture. You aren’t just capturing the shape of their nose or the color of their eyes. Any phone camera could record what a person’s face looks like. That is not the purpose of a portrait.
The purpose of a portrait is to turn a normal person’s face or body into a piece of art that represents who they really are. You go to a location or sit in your studio and you capture an image of that person. Then you use your editing software to turn that image into a portrait.
Lightroom presets for portraits can take your images from decent to spectacular. You can choose the artistic style you want your picture to have, think about what mood you want to evoke with the portrait, choose and apply your preset, and be amazed at the piece of art that pops up on your screen. Lightroom presets for portraits are powerful editing tools that will up your portrait game and turn your customers into loyal fans who will come back to you over and over again for their portrait needs.
How to use Lightroom Portrait Presets
Our Lightroom portrait presets are insanely easy to use. With a click of the mouse, you can apply your preset to your image and see it transform. Once you have downloaded the presets into lightroom, just click on the preset you want to select in the left panel, and you will immediately see the preset addded on to your image.
What are presets?
Presets are simply pre-adjusted settings for Lightroom. We adjust highlights, exposure, colors, haze, and many other settings to create a beautiful effect that you can use on any image. Click on the preset you want and you will see what your picture looks like with those settings applied. From there, you can further adjust your settings if you want to make your picture even more perfect, you can leave it with the preset adjustments as they are, or you can take off the preset if it did not really give you the look you wanted.
Can’t I just make my own presets?
You sure can! It’s easy to move your sliders, save your settings, and create your own preset. But what is game-changing about our portrait presets is how beautiful they are, and how fast and convenient they are to use. Instead of having to spend thirty minutes creating your own preset, you can just choose which look or looks you want for your portrait session and apply them with a single click.
Why do I need presets?
The picture in the camera is hardly ever the exact image that you want to convey the feeling or artistic look you are going for. This is why editing is important. The camera catches the raw data of the light that is available to the sensor. You are responsible for getting the right focus, setting the right exposure, getting a good angle to your subject, and eliciting a good expression from them. But the camera is not going to catch the feeling of magic that you felt when you saw the way the golden hour light lit up your subject’s hair. It will catch the hair, but it won’t catch the feeling. If you want to make your clients and viewers feel the way you did when you saw that sunlight, you need to edit it to bring that magic into the image.
Presets are amazing for this. They give you an edit that is already designed to convey a feeling. Even if you are already an expert at editing your pictures from scratch in Lightroom, applying a preset will give you a way to look at getting that effect that you might not have thought of otherwise. Presets are a powerful artistic tool that will save you tons of time editing and will open the doors to effects and photographic communication that you might never have been able to access otherwise.
Presets and the art of editing
The art of photography is about capturing a moment in time. Not just the clinical assessment of the moment – this person has brown hair and a square jaw and is sitting on a chair – but a sensitive, artistic, narrative moment in time. Photography is an art. Presets help you make that art by helping you see different ways to edit and by helping you to make gorgeous edits on your photos.
Photography is also, for many people, a business. You don’t have all the time in the world to obsess over edits for every single image. You need to get through the pictures quickly and shoot them back to your customers so they can order them. Our portrait Lightroom presets will help you get your pictures edited quickly and gorgeously so that you can get your proofs to your customers and they can get their orders in to you. You can spend more time on the things that matter, like making art with your favorite images, because you won’t be spending hours upon hours editing a single portrait session. With our portrait presets for Lightroom, you can enjoy making stunning images without spending forever on each one.