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The home of enthusiastic supporters of Fine Art Photography. We respect its history, admire its present form, and look forward to its future.

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Lightroom Presets — My Biggest Undoing As a Newbie Photographer

5 min readSep 19, 2023

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Waves washing ashore
Image by author

When you start a new hobby, passion, or business, you want to shorten the learning curve. You want to grab any available shortcuts, tools, and processes to get you out of newbie land ASAP.

Grab one I did in the form of Lightroom presets when I started photography.

Many friends online won’t stop raving about how presets helped them edit faster and produce better-quality images. As a photographer, you dream of creating the finest jpgs in the shortest time.

Along with many colleagues, I’ve benefitted immensely and garnered lots of praise from passing my pictures through these presets. But also, they were my undoing in many ways.

Things quickly got one-dimensional

I settled on one favorite preset for just about every picture. Landscape, pet, portrait, fashion, it didn’t matter. Before long, things became overly one-dimensional, and my favorite preset didn’t work as well on every picture.

By one-dimensional, I mean a mix of a warm, brownish finish on every image. Rookie mistake 101.

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The home of enthusiastic supporters of Fine Art Photography. We respect its history, admire its present form, and look forward to its future.

Mag of Ghana
Mag of Ghana

Written by Mag of Ghana

Professional photographer and writer talking about the people, places, and culture of Ghana. [email protected]

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