Originally posted by BruceBanner I'm not hearing of many users however saying 'this is the style I do' or 'I adore these presets from this place and apply them 90% of the time' etc
Ah, didn't see that one. I did start out looking for ready-made presets for Lightroom but quickly concluded that I might as well roll my own. I'm not at my "darkroom" PC now, but from memory my LR import settings are roughly:
- Highlights pulled down (different settings per ISO and camera, but say 50-90 down)
- Shadows pulled up (depending on ISO say 50-70 up)
- Pulling in the black and white points to increase contrast (Whites up about 10-20, Blacks roughly 10 down)
- Lens profile applied
- CA correction applied
- Noise reduction set to none for lower ISO values, applied to taste for higher ISOs
- Sharpening; for cameras with AA filters I use roughly 100 minus the value of NR; much less for AA-less cameras
- Important - add a sharpening mask of 50-100 depending on NR and sharpening values (basically increase until you don't sharpen image noise).
- I set Camera Calibration to Embedded rather than Adobe Default
- Everything else I apply by hand on an image-to-image basis.
Of course, this is all a matter of taste, and highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks need to be adjusted per image anyway, but usually not by too much. Maybe 80% of the work is done automatically on import.
Btw, by pulling in the white and black points you will also increase perceived saturation. I will sometimes knock the saturation slider a few points down to compensate.
Also worth checking out is the Split Toning - there are some nice videos on the topic. I don't have any presets for this, though.