June 22, 2010


Mouse over for Before/After sample.

I frequently crawl under the hood in Lightroom. Today I’m working some projects in LR3 and experimenting with the latest features and tools. Something I’ve started doing to make certain effects more adaptable, is what I’m calling Tone Independent Presets. They add an effects without using any of the primary tone settings like exposure, brightness, contrast, white balance etc. The result is an effect that can easily be applied to a plain image, or after general and batch corrections without effecting previous tone settings. This preset is an example of that.

I’ve spent quite some time today (probably too much) looking at the tones and feel of classic Polaroids and doing lots of tweaks in LR to get the look I wanted. The result is this effect I’m calling Gavin’s Old Polaroid. It’s a classic Polaroid themed tone that I think you’ll find appealing. This is a test of effects that will probably show up soon in an update to Color Fantasies presets collection. You get it today however and it’s free to boot. You can download the ZIP below. While it uses some LR3 features, This, like all my other presets will still work on older versions of LR. Enjoy… Gav

Download Old Polaroid Preset ZIP

How to install Lightroom Presets.

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