Lightroom Preset: CMS-High Key

Wow I am running so behind on everything, even blogging.

Before High Key Preset

The purpose of high key in photography is to remove as much of the dark tone from the photograph as possible creating a noticeable lack of contrast.

High Key images have a bright and happy feel to them, especially compared to Low Key images which are dark and moody.  This bright happy feel tends to allow the view to experience positive emotions. Keep this in mind when selecting your high key subjects. High Key adds a nice effect of softening the image through tonal control and High Key works extremely well for removing any skin imperfections as well.

For this preset to work your image must be at least properly exposed. Under exposed images will generally experience noise and only appear to be slightly over exposed; rather than high key.


This preset is accomplished by bumping the exposure and brightness quite a bit, but also adding some fill light and tweaking the tone curve with the following settings:

In the after-image on the right, you can see the final results. A strong light feeling is applied to the portrait and there is a nice loss of detail to the skin which cleans the image up nicely. And although the subject's facial details are lost, this is sort of the point. High Key works really well with non-people subjects like a white rose on a white backgorund, or even chess pieces. Have fun with this.  

Download Here

To install the preset, copy the file in the zip (xxx.lrtemplate) to your Develop Presets folder on your computer. If you don't know where to find this folder, open Lightroom. Click on Edit menu and select Preferences. Click on the Presets tab and click the Show Lightroom Presets Folder... button.


Sorry for the delay in getting this out... but it is here now. Enjoy. Come back on Monday for another preset.

Highlights: -66

Lights: +43

Darks: +100

Shadows +9


After High Key Preset