Jumpstart Your Creativity with Lightroom’s 1-Click Adaptive Presets (VIDEO)
Today’s time-saving post processing tutorial demonstrates how easy it is to enhance a photograph with one click by applying Lightroom’s game-changing Adaptive presets in a selective manner, i.e. just where they’re needed. The video lesson below is presented by the popular Adobe Lightroom YouTube channel that boasts 37M views, 358K subscribers, and almost 900 instructional videos.
Instructor Bea Lubas kicks off the episode like this: “Lightroom presets can help speed up the creative process, while Adaptive presets enable you to automatically apply enhancements to specific parts in your photo.” Lubas is a food and lifestyle photographer, author, and Lightroom Ambassador—offering solid tips for beginners and experienced users alike.
She presents her recommendations in the contest of tabletop imagery but everything you’ll learn is equally valuable for streamlining your workflow when editing other genres of photographs. She opens the panel on the right side of the screen where you’ll find Lightroom’s Recommended and Premium presets along with those you’ve created yourself.
The Adaptive options reside as a group at the top of the Premium section. She explains the difference between conventional and Adaptive presets like this: “A preset is a set of adjustments you can apply to the entire image at once. Adaptive presets, on the other hand, can be introduced to one or more individual portions of the frame without affecting adjacent areas.”
These versatile tools are labeled Portrait, Sky, Subject, and Blur Background, each with a sub menu underneath each choice. Lubas begins by pulling up a still-life shot of colorful flowers and applies a standard, global enhancement. She then transforms the image further with an Adaptive Subject preset identified as “Pop.” As you’ll see, it’s super simple to adjust the strength of the effect if you desire.
This is just one of the several techniques explained by Lubas, and she walks you through the magic you can create when applying Adaptive presets for portrait imagery, dull skies in landscape shots, and cluttered scenes that will benefit when you blur a distracting background.
The Adobe Lightroom YouTube channel is a great resource for anyone interested in improving their Lightroom skills.
Be sure to watch our earlier tutorial with another post-processing instructor who takes a deep dive into Lightroom’s new Variance tool, demonstrating how it enables you quickly rehabilitate photographs with unsightly color balance problems.
