Lightroom Presets

Presets – Lightroom 3 Grain

A couple of weeks ago, Adobe released a beta version of Lightroom 3. Among the new features is a grain effect that people have been asking for to simulate film grain. So I figured what better candidate for a new preset then some grain effects. They’re pretty straightforward and there’s 3 versions of the effect from Light, to Medium to Heavy. I purposely left off any black and white, lomo, or cross-process settings (which is the type of photo we see this effect being added to) because I figure you’ll apply those settings to your photo first and then add some grain at the end. Also, before you have a look at them though, you should realize two things:

1) The grain effect really needs to be zoomed into 100% to see best. You can see it at lower zoom levels but don’t make any judgment calls on it until you see it at 100%.

2) On a personal note, I’m actually not that into the “grain” look. Its not something I used to like in film and I typically tried to avoid it. Plus, I spend a lot of money on lenses to get sharp images, so adding grain back in doesn’t do much for me. But hey, I totally get that A LOT of people really like this effect. Its been on the hot list of requests for quite some time now.

So enjoy and please leave a comment to let me know what you think. Thanks!

• Click here to see a sample of the preset.
• Click here to download Matt’s Grain Presets
• To Install the Presets just unzip them to your desktop. Then right click in your preset panel and choose Import and choose the file you unzipped. MAKE SURE YOU UNZIP THE PRESET ZIP FILE FIRST. DO NOT TRY TO IMPORT THE ZIP FILE AS THE PRESET.

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