Test // Presetr Lightroom Presets

Although we like our photos to look natural, editing is a big part of the process. We like our photos to be soft, timeless and warm, not with too much contrast and saturation. After the launch of VSCO FILM we’ve found our editing routine.  It took a long time to modify the presets we use now. If you think that buying a preset pack suddenly makes your photos super duper awesome, you are wrong. The photo itself has to be good – editing doesn’t save the image, although you can work wonders with today’s editing software. You still need to know your camera. You need to know when to overexpose and when to underexpose. You need to know how you want to edit that image when you are only just thinking about taking the photo.

Like with all presets, finding The One is always hard. It takes trial and error. Especially when it comes to editing wedding photos. Within 12-16 hours you are faced with a lot of different lightning conditions and finding a preset that works with all of them is hard. And since editing a wedding takes time, we have always liked to use one color and one BW preset and sometimes play with something special on a couple of photos. Using only a couple of presets makes our work consistent and we like consistency. When we started out, our editing was a mess. Having almost endless possibilities and not quite knowing yet what you like and what you don’t – it messes with your head. Finding your style can be hard. So we used a little bit of this and a little bit of that. We spent way too much time editing a single photo and it took days to edit a quick portrait session. Thank goodness we realized that editing one single photo for hours doesn’t make it better. At least not in our case.

A few days ago we got a message asking if we could test new presets for Lightroom called Presetr and write about our experience. So we did some quick testing with them. Since at the time of testing these presets had been made based on Canon RAW files, testing them on our Nikon files gave quite different results than intended, but on some presets we got quite nice results that we liked a lot. What’s good about this pack is that there’s a lot to choose from. There’s the more natural/faded and stronger/contrasty ones. Many we fell in love with, many were too strong for our taste. Like said, we like natural line when it comes to editing. But for personal projects there’s many presets that we will definitely be using in the future as well as for the photos we like to play with.

For 39€ it’s not a big investment (-15% if you like the preset page!) so if you like the look, go for it.
If you’re using Nikon, maybe wait until the Nikon version is released and you will get more value for your money.

Here’s some examples from the Presetr One pack (expect Instant 500, which is part of Presetr Two, not yet released).

Black & White Soft+

Black & White Soft

Bright

Faded Dated (no grain)

Faded Boost

Faded Gold

Faded Neutral

Infra 01+

Instant 500 (grain 30)

Sunrise 02 (no grain)

The Bronze-

Vivid Faded-