Lightroom Adds Video Color Editing, with Prolost Presets

June 15, 2022

The same edit controls that you already use to make your photography shine can now be used with your videos as well! Not only can you use Lightroom’s editing capabilities to make your video clips look their best, you can also copy and paste edit settings between photos and videos, allowing you to achieve a consistent aesthetic across both your photos and videos. Presets, including Premium Presets and Lightroom’s AI-powered Recommended Presets, can also be used with videos. Lightroom also allows you to trim off the beginning or end of a video clip to highlight the part of the video that is most important.

Premium Presets in Lightroom for iPhone.

Not all of Lightroom’s color controls are working for video, but it’s enough to be useful. Not every video workflow requires a timeline and dedicated color tools, so I welcome these features.

In fact, I was graciously invited to contribute to them, in the form of a set of Premium Presets available to Creative Cloud subscribers.

Update Lightroom to the latest version to get the new video features, and find my presets under Video: Creative.

Visual Effects Compositing in Adobe After Effects: My IBC 2019 Talk

September 19, 2019

Adobe graciously invited me to speak at their IBC 2019 booth about visual effects compositing in After Effects — something I’ve been doing against all advice for many (many!) years. You can watch the entire talk here:

Lightroom CC Presets and Profiles Sync

July 03, 2018

Finally!

(And pssst... there’s a sale! Details below.)

From the Adobe Blog on June 19:

Starting today, Lightroom CC, our cloud-based photo service, can synchronize both presets and profiles, including custom-created presets and third-party presets and profiles. This means you can have access to any preset that you’ve made or purchased on all of your devices, enabling you to truly edit your photos anywhere.

Note that this syncing only works with Lightroom CC. Lightroom Classic was updated as well, but Adobe is being true to their word that cloud-based syncing workflows are not a part of Classic’s improvement roadmap.

So this means, and again I really have to say finally, if you use any of my Prolost Profiles and/or Presets in Lightroom CC desktop, they will now sync to the mobile versions. And it’s a good, smart sync too — you can manage which profiles and presets are visible on Lightroom CC for iOS and Android.

What this means for me is that my Lightroom workflow — which has always been heavily based around presets, and now profiles as well — works completely on my iPhone. Put another way, the camera I always have with me has most of my desktop-based post-processing workflow built right in.

#yourfilter is better than #nofilter

There are no shortage of fun, easy and/or creative ways to post-process your iPhone photos, but what excites me about this is that, whether you use Profiles or Presets, and whether you build your own, or buy from folks like me, you can now curate your own collection of mobile photo looks. And you can apply them to raw DNGs that you can shoot with increasingly sophisticated control, using your phone’s camera. This is far more sophisticated than simply applying filters to our mobile photos. It’s more akin to choosing your own digital film stock.

Slow is Smooth

The reason I didn’t blog about this promptly was that I was visiting Yosemite National Park with my family. I had my Sony a7S II with me of course, but I shot a lot with my iPhone as well. Along with Preset & Profile sync, Lightroom CC for iOS also now features a “technology preview” of a Long Exposure mode, with optional built-in stabilization so you can get silky slow-shutter shots without a trpid. I tried it out on Yosemite’s beautiful waterfalls, and then was able to complete all the post I would ever want to do on these shots right there on my iPhone X.

Bridalveil Fall, Long Exposure. All processing done in Lightroom CC for iOS. — Bridalveil Fall, Long Exposure. All processing done in Lightroom CC for iOS.

My brother Eric in front of the glacier exhibit he sculpted for the Yosemite Visitor's Center. Prolost Geartrain GT02 profile, all processing done in Lightroom CC for iOS.

My wife and son in front of Yosemite Falls. Prolost Geartrain GT10 profile, all processing done in Lightroom CC for iOS.

Lower Yosemite Falls, Long Exposure. All processing done in Lightroom CC for iOS. — Lower Yosemite Falls, Long Exposure. All processing done in Lightroom CC for iOS.

Celebrating with a Sale

I’m so excited about this Lightroom release that I’m putting all my Lightroom Presets and Profiles on sale through July 4th. Use coupon code FINALLY to get 40% off.

Shop Prolost Presets & Profiles

Prolost Lightroom Presets, Now in Photoshop Too

April 04, 2018

Adobe updated both the Lightroom line of Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic yesterday, as well as the Camera Raw importer for Photoshop CC. My previous post was all about Profiles. This one is about some important changes to presets.

Lightroom Classic Now Shares Presets (and Profiles) with Photoshop

Lightroom Develop/Edit presets are now saved in the .xmp format that's compatible with Camera Raw in Photoshop, and Lightroom Classic shares a common location for these presets with Photoshop, meaning that your preset collection will be the same in both apps.

In other words, the Prolost Lightroom Presets finally work in Photoshop! If you’ve always wanted the powerful Prolost Graduated Preset workflow in Photoshop’s Camera Raw tool, your wishes have come true.

And the same is true of the Prolost Profiles I released earlier today: When you install them for Lightroom Classic 7.3, you’re also installing them for Photoshop CC.

Presets Preview Big

Lightroom CC has always previewed Edit Presets on the full-size “loupe” view of your photo. Lightroom Classic 7.3 now does the same. This welcome change makes the Prolost Graduated Preset workflow even more awesome.

Full-screen previews for presets is a great complement to the Prolost Graduated Presets.

Conversion to XMP is Automatic, and Problematic

When you first run Lightroom Classic version 7.3 after upgrading from a pervious version, your Develop presets get converted to the .xmp format automatically. More details here.

For most presets this works fine, but a few of my Prolost Graduated Presets get corrupted by the process. You can either manually fix just those, or just re-install the entire set. I recommend the latter, as I was able to make some nice cosmetic improvements to the presets thanks to the new format.

There’s also a bug with XMP presets and photos with older B&W profiles. More details here.

Adobe is aware of these issues and working on a fix.

Lightroom CC Does its Own Thing

While Lightroom CC 1.3 also uses the new/not-new .xmp format for presets and profiles, it has its own installation procedure and location for these files. If you use both (against Adobe’s recommendation), you’ll need to install separately for each.

Installing presets for Lightroom CC is now much easier. You can import individual presets, folders of presets, or even zip files containing presets. I've updated my presets and the installation instructions accordingly.

No User Presets for Mobile

Unfortunately there's still no way to install presets (or profiles) into Lightroom CC for iOS or Android.

Prolost Profiles in the new Profile browser in Lightroom CC 1.3, released today.

Introducing Prolost Profiles for Lightroom

April 03, 2018

Adobe released Lightroom Classic 7.3 and Lightroom CC 1.3 today, both featuring improved support for Creative Profiles, which have the potential to give your photos exciting new looks.

Prolost Profiles

To celebrate this launch, I’m releasing six sets of Creative Profiles on the Prolost Store.

Prolost Profiles on the Prolost Store

These are fun, powerful looks for your photos that you can browse visually and audition with a full-screen preview. Yes, Lightroom has finally caught up to where Magic Bullet Looks has been for years.

Like all my Lightroom offerings, I made these profiles for my own photography, and I’m sharing them with you in the hopes that you find them fun and useful. I’m excited to finally be able to create looks in Lightroom that go beyond what we can create with just the Develop sliders.

Presets and Profiles

Where Lightroom Develop Presets are shortcuts to applying Develop/Edit settings, Lightroom Profiles typically apply an overall look to the photo. They leave all the Develop/Edit controls unchanged, so you can adjust them to taste. Unlike Presets, Profiles can create looks that are not possible with the Lightroom controls on their own (through the use of 3D LUTs).

Lightroom has long supported “Camera Profiles,” but they were not very visible, and used mostly to match camera JPEG output. With today’s updates, Profiles get a nice visual browsing system that’s front-and-center in the interface, and a differentiation between Camera Profiles and “Creative Profiles” like mine.

The cynical take on Creative Profiles is that they’re like Instagram filters for Lightroom. But given that they work on raw files, and that they combine with the immense and tasteful editing controls available within Lightroom, I think it’s much better to think of them as “virtual film stocks.”

Creative Profiles can support an Amount slider, so you can apply as much or as little of the look as you like. So like everything in Lightroom, they are just tools that rely on your eye and taste to provide good results.

All the Prolost Profiles support the Amount slider, so you can season to taste.

What About Mobile?

While new versions of Lightroom CC for iOS and Android were also posted today featuring the same built-in Creative Profiles as CC Desktop and Classic, there’s not yet any way to install custom profiles like mine on the mobile version of Lightroom.

Changes for Presets

These Lightroom updates change how presets work too. It’s a big enough topic that I’ll cover it in my next post, but if you want answers now, you can check out the FAQs over on the Prolost Store:

Read more about this Lightroom update at the Adobe Blog.