Lightroom Presets

Presets – Kuler Web Colors

It’s Tuesday and I’m in New York City teaching Lightroom at B&H Photo. I had two jam packed classes yesterday and lot’s of blog readers came by to say hi. If you’re around today make sure you stop in and introduce yourself.

Anyway, on to the preset… this week I’ve got something really different for you. Instead of giving you free presets to download I’m going to let you make your own web presets (I know, I’m very generous today) 🙂 However, ever though you’ll be making your own presets I’ll give you the tools to do it with to come up with some pretty sweet looking web galleries. See, one of the things people have the biggest problems with is figuring out which colors will look good for custom web galleries. Sure, you can choose the default black template in the Web module in Lightroom and be done with it. But what do you do if you want to be creative with some of the colors and you just don’t know where to start? Well, you can use Adobe Kuler (a free web application) to find some really great color combinations and then input them into the Web module. It works like this:

1) Go to kuler.adobe.com. Start searching through the website for color combinations you like. You can create your own or just click on Most Popular to see some good ideas.

2) Once you find the one you like click on it to select it. Then you’ll see 3 small icons under it. Click on the rightmost icon (the sliders) to make changes to the color settings.

3) Instead of changing the colors, just read the RGB color values for each color and write them down.

4) Go into Lightroom’s Web module. Scroll down to the Color Palette panel on the right.

5) Click on the Background, Cells, Rollover, Grid Lines, and Text color swatches and enter in the color values you took from Kuler.

Here’s a sample I made from the Kuler combination called “Quite Cry”.

It’s pretty cool how you can come up with some really amazing color combinations and make some totally different (yet nice looking) web galleries with color combinations from Kuler. Give it a try… (lame joke alert – very lame attempt at humor coming)… It’s Kule! I hope you enjoy and make sure you share your favorite Kuler preset name or color combos in the comments here. See ya!

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