Steve Losh

Lately I haven't had time to spend hours manipulating one image at a time so I've started looking at Lightroom's presets. Some of them are pretty unexciting but there are a few that actually give fairly interesting effects, especially if you tweak their settings after applying them. None of them will look perfect on an image on their own but if you adjust the settings to suit the photo you're applying them to they can look quite nice.

I tried out a few different presets on a photo I took a few days ago. The photo itself made explore on Flickr, but one of the manipulations also made explore and ranked even higher. All I did was apply a preset and tweak a few of the values to better fit the image.

Which of these do you prefer?

The original image, converted to black and white.

The cold tone preset with some adjustments.

My own "hot tone" preset. Based on the cold tone preset.

The aged photo preset with tweaks.