Lightroom Presets

Presets – Darkening Brush Presets

Since Lightroom 2 came out, I’ve realized a whole new area for presets has emerged – Adjustment Brush presets. If you haven’t seen it yet, go to the Adjustment Brush tool in LR 2 and click on the Effect list. There’s a few defaults at the top but you may notice one called Soften Skin which is actually a custom preset. Well, it got me thinking about brush presets I use a lot so I’ve started coming up with some. This week, I’m releasing my darkening brush presets. In a nutshell, they adjust the exposure to a negative number (-1/3, -1/2, -2/3, and -1 stop). I realize I could have gone further but then the list gets rather long and, frankly, I rarely find myself darkening something by more then 1 stop with the brush (I use it more for subtle changes). It won’t stop here though. I’ve got more that I’ll release in the coming weeks but I thought this was a good start.

Anyway, these are a little different to install from the regular Develop presets so here’s the instructions.
1) Navigate to your Lightroom presets folder. The easiest way to do this is to go to Lightroom’s preferences by clicking the Lightroom menu and choosing Preferences (PC: Edit > Preferences). Then choose the Presets tab and click the “Show Lightroom Presets Folder” button to open the Lightroom Folder.
2) Now go into the Lightroom Folder. Then go into the Local Adjustment Presets folder. You’ll know you’re in the right folder because you should see the file “Soften Skin.lrtemplate” there too.
3) Unzip the file you downloaded from the bottom of this post.
4) Copy and paste the “.lrtemplate” files into the Local Adjustment Presets folder.
5) Restart Lightroom

Now when you go to your Adjustment Brush you should see the presets in the Effect list near Soften Skin. Pretty neat huh? If you’ve got any comments or ideas for some other ones, let me know in the comments area. Have a great day!

• Click here to download the Darkening Brush presets.

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