Lightroom Presets – Matt's Auto-Enhance Preset
Hi everyone. I’ve had a bunch of requests to update my Auto Enhance preset. A while back, I found myself making the same adjustments over and over again. So I figured the Auto Tone settings in Lightroom, along with some of the Vibrance, Clarity and Vignetting settings that I always use made it a perfect candidate for an auto preset to apply in the Import dialog.
There’s 3 Different Downloads For This One
So here’s the deal. First, there’s a few different presets here. One is just an all-around insta-fix preset. It doesn’t include any camera profiles. The others (separate downloads) are for Nikon and Canon only – and they do include profiles. The Auto-toning stuff, clarity, vignetting and all of the other settings stay exactly the same for all of them. The only thing that changes are the profiles (Landscape, Portrait, Faithful, etc…).
They’re mainly intended to be used when you’re importing your photos into Lightroom (there’s a spot in the import dialog for you to pick a preset). If your particular shoot was a portrait session and you’re fond of the Nikon “Camera Portrait” profile then choose the “Auto Enhance – Portrait (Nikon)” preset. If you were on a landscape shoot then try the “Auto Enhance – Landscape (Nikon)” preset or even the Vivid one. If you shot a portrait with a great landscape behind it, well, you’re outta luck 😉 Actually, it kind of relies on you at least knowing which profiles you’ve become fond of because you’ll need to decide which to apply on import. Remember, if you pick the wrong one you can always change it.
Disclaimer: For me, I found that I needed to tweak the Exposure setting after I applied the preset on most of my photos. Remember, these are just a quick starting point, because they adjust a few of the sliders I think we adjust anyway. But, as with all presets, you’ll definitely want to adjust the sliders a little after. My hope with the auto-fix presets is that you won’t have to adjust quite as many.
Before:
After:
- The preset downloads for Lightroom 4 are below (I made them for LR4. You can try them in LR3 but they’re tuned for LR4 specifically):
- Auto-Enhance (All Purpose with no profiles)
- Auto-Enhance (Nikon Profiles)
- Auto-Enhance (Canon Profiles)
- And here’s a link to a video on how to install and organize Lightroom presets if you don’t know how.
Have a good one!