Fourth and final in a series of reviews about Totally Rad Lightroom Presets
THE USUAL RECAP:
This is the fourth and final in a series of reviews about the new Totally Rad Lightroom Presets offered by Doug Boutwell over at Totally Rad. The first three reviews focused on the Basics, Black & White and Effects. This review will focus on the Vignettes and Toning presets.
Same as the other three, except I worked with ALL of the presets as I saw fit for this review. Once again, the images are first shown straight out of the camera and other than using the presets, have had no other Lightroom or Photoshop adjustments.
Lots of fun clicking and note taking. Still using my favorite Wonder Woman notebook : )
I did some Basics adjustments first (Contrast, Brightside/Lite and Highlight Hero/Medium) then from the Effects presets I chose Golden Age/Strong. The image still wasn’t as refined as I wanted it to be, so I next used See-Pee-Ya!/Lite from the Vignettes & Toning presets. I really like how the image is starting to look very painterly:
I decided to go back to the Basics and see what might happen. I quickly clicked through the entire list of presets and liked a combination of Brightside/Lite and Electric Skies/Lite best. The results are quite lovely. The image is still warm and has a dreamlike painterly feeling, but there is more black and therefore more detail in the shadows:
I wanted to up the drama factor, so I selected the Michelangelo vignette. The result is stunning. The background falls away, yet detail remains and the subject appears to be almost spotlit:
My next image was shot in the studio with a Nikon 24-120 f/3.5-5.6 lens. This is not a fast lens, but as I was shooting with studio strobes I didn’t need a fast lens. Here is the image straight out to the camera (Nikon D70) and it is just perfect the way it is. The exposure, color balance and contrast are superb. I LOVE studio lighting! I also love this tulip colored paper:
Despite the fact that the image is perfection straight out of the camera, I couldn’t resist tinkering with the Basics….just to see what I could come up with. Zowie! Talk about some super saturated color and POP! Check out the results of using A Beginning/Strong, Contrast, Shadows & Blacks, Electric Skies/Lite, Highlight Hero/Medium and Smack My Pix Up/Lite. It kind of has that hot, stylized David LaChapelle look. Almost:
This is my last review of these presets and I wanted to go back to the Black & White presets. I really love these beauties. I took the image above, with all those adjustments from the Basics and applied the black and white preset Riot Juice. What a perfectly lovely black and white image, with beautiful tonal range. The shadows have detail and so do the highlights. Incredibly dreamy stuff:
This image could also go either cooler or warmer. I decided on warmer and went back to the Vignettes & Toning presets and selected Chocolate Rain/Light. The result is a warm, brown image that still retains all the hallmarks I outline above of a well exposed and ‘printed’ black and white photograph:
To round out this final review, I chose Donatello from the five available vignettes. Perfection. It added just the right touch of depth and drama to an already fabulous image:
As with all the other presets in this set, the Vignettes & Toning presets are a super fast, easy and fun way to create a wide variety of looks to your photographs.
A bit heavy overall on the yellow side of the color spectrum for my personal taste.
GOOD STUFF. When you take the entire set of Totally Rad Lightroom Presets together, you have a POWERFUL set of image post-processing tools at your fingertips for a surprising low price. Presets like these help make Lightroom a phenomenal image management and post-processing system, either alone on in concert with Photoshop. They can also help streamline work flow. Depending on how heavy your shooting load is, they could drastically reduce your hours in front of the computer.
Bottom line? I’m happy to have them loaded on my machine.
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