Shooting in raw format means you get the best quality from your images but when you shoot in raw you need to process the images later on your computer. So, in what I plan to become a regular event is the first Lightroom Preset post. This week’s is a black and white conversion of quite a contrasty form which I hope you’ll enjoy. But first a little intro… A digital camera has the capacity to shoot in ‘RAW’ format, that is to say the image saved onto the memory card has not been processed beyond the original capture information of of the camera settings: aperture, shutter speed and so on. The adjustments to correct the colours, white balance, fine tune the contrast and ensure a clean image are applied later with the use of computer software. Once happy these can then be ‘processed’ (much the same thinking as processing negatives to prints) instead creating electronic versions: jpegs, tiffs or any other image file you can think of. This ensures ALL the information at the time the image is made is retained, in short this means better quality images and prints.

Using Adobe Lightroom for Raw processing means, amoungst other things, I have at my disposal the ability to apply the settings I need to get the best from an image, furthermore I can save those settings to apply to any images I feel would suit that same kind of treatment, be it a black and white conversion, a crop or a simple touch-up in the saturation and colour vibrancy. I’m always creating presets, some are subtle and some are as subtle as a brick to the forehead but hopefully by providing some you’ll get the chance to use them. Some may work ‘out of the box’ when some may serve as good starting points and need further tweeking…

So, to kick things off is a simple one I use fairly regularly, dubbed ’300 Test’ due to the fact I was going for a look similar to that seen in the film 300…whilst I may be a little off the result works exceptionally well on days with little or no cloud, giving a high contrast and blue to black conversion. This is also quite interesting in some portrait situations though personally works best to tame a mid-summer’s day – not the usual habitat for a landscape photographer who usually gets up before dawn and hangs around waiting for sunsets…See for yourself, the before:

and after:

and now play with it yourself, right-click and choose ‘Save as’:

300-test

Leave a comment if this has been useful and the application you’ve used it in, or indeed if you think the preset could be improved upon…for which I will provide an update!