Lightroom Preset: Civil War



Civil War: Before the Preset

 One of the powerful elements of Lightroom is the power of the presets. It isn't that presets are particularly interesting or useful in every work flow, but they can save a ton of time for certain types or groups of images.

To the left is the an image taken at a civil war reenactment. By itself, without any processing it is a nice image of a soldier clearing the breach of a cannon that has been fired.

But the photo fails to look authentic to the period. It has strong colors, looks new and fresh: this alone fails to inspire and tell a story I wanted told. Instead it looks like a current day reenactment and that is not what I wanted at all.

Civil War: After the Preset

When I got home from this shoot I knew the look I wanted for the 1200 or so images that I shot at the reenactment. So rather than hand process all 1200 of the images, I used a preset that I developed from a previous reenactment shoot and applied the preset to all 1200 images automatically while I added them to my catalog.

And while I went back into each image to fine tune it, the act of applying the preset to all of the images saved me hours of work applying the settings by hand; adjusting blacks, exposure, sharpening, saturation, and dozens more.

This preset strenthens the shadows, blows out the hightlights a little, desaturates the red, yellows and greens and adds a little punch to the smoke.

For those of you who like the looks of this preset and would like to use it please feel free to download it using the link below. Once a week I will publish a new preset for you to be able to use.

Enjoy.

Download Here

To install copy the file in the zip 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.