LRB Grads
To aid users in selecting the right look for their landscape images, I’ve created a set of over 100 Graduated Filter presets to get you started with making creative choices for your images. Covering both landscape and portrait orienations, as well as hard and soft line filters, these filters come in 3 standard colours: ND (Grey), Blue and Tobacco. As is also standard, they come in strengths of 1 stop (0.3), 2 stops (0.6) and 3 stops (0.9). To aid in positioning, the filters have 3 positions: Top, Middle and Bottom, giving you a good starting point for your photo.
In addition, there’s also a set of Sunset Grad filters to darken and warm the sky, along with warming the forground. The final set of filters are based on the new sharpening in Lightroom 3, where below -50 on the Sharpness control acts as lens blur. This enable the creation of the new TiltShift presets included in this pack.
Why should you pay for these, when you could create them yourself? Well the fact that it takes a bunch of time to put them together is the best reason. Probably more than €5 of your time. Also by running down through the Presets panel on the left of Develop, you can preview them quickly to see how they look with your image by viewing the Navigator window. Much quicker than mucking around with sliders.
These sets do get upgraded from time to time, so keep your download link safe. You should really bookmark the page, and even have a document for all your important links online somewhere private.
The most recent update of these files added support for the new Exposure controls in Lightroom 4.
Samples
You can see some of the presets in sample form here: Download Sample Grads
Install
To install these presets, drop the Sample Grads folder into:
User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets on OS X,
C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets on XP-Note that Application Data is a hidden folder,
C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets on Vista and Win 7,
where User is your login name.
Or you can click on Preferences>Presets>Show Lightroom Presets Folders to open this folder in Finder/Explorer. Then open the Develop Presets folder from there.
Price: €5 (note that VAT is charged in the EU)
