Setting black and white points in Lightroom

MarkR

A while back I got frustrated with Lightroom's Auto exposure settings. I liked the idea of quickly setting the black and white points to get an image "in the ballpark" but I found that the Auto Tone button did too much, moving the contrast and brightness settings, as well as the highlight and fill light sliders. I prefer to adjust those myself.

What I really wanted was a preset that did two things: 1) adjust the exposure (white point) and 2) set the blacks slider (black point.) It's a rough approximation of Auto Levels for Lightroom, I guess. Anyway,

Here's what I came up with after some trial and error:


s = {
id = "8E6F4D33-B75A-458C-8762-369A464BE5AE",
internalName = "Set black and white points",
title = "Set black and white points",
type = "Develop",
value = {
settings = {
AutoBrightness = false,
AutoContrast = false,
AutoExposure = true,
AutoShadows = true,
AutoTone = false,
},
uuid = "8A112017-ECDC-4125-89A5-6D796A67DC9B",
},
version = 0,
}

Copy the above into a text editor, and save it as a *.lrtemplate.

You can then import it by right mouse clicking on a Preset folder within Lightroom, selecting Import, and navigating to your newly created file.

I'd be interested to know if anybody finds this useful.

Personally, I find it more useful than Auto Tone for quick editing photos. For hero images, I'll tend to leave it alone and do things manually.

DavidTO

Cool!

rockingcpa

MarkR wrote: »

A while back I got frustrated with Lightroom's Auto exposure settings. I liked the idea of quickly setting the black and white points to get an image "in the ballpark" but I found that the Auto Tone button did too much, moving the contrast and brightness settings, as well as the highlight and fill light sliders. I prefer to adjust those myself.

What I really wanted was a preset that did two things: 1) adjust the exposure (white point) and 2) set the blacks slider (black point.) It's a rough approximation of Auto Levels for Lightroom, I guess. Anyway,

Here's what I came up with after some trial and error:


s = {
id = "8E6F4D33-B75A-458C-8762-369A464BE5AE",
internalName = "Set black and white points",
title = "Set black and white points",
type = "Develop",
value = {
settings = {
AutoBrightness = false,
AutoContrast = false,
AutoExposure = true,
AutoShadows = true,
AutoTone = false,
},
uuid = "8A112017-ECDC-4125-89A5-6D796A67DC9B",
},
version = 0,
}

Copy the above into a text editor, and save it as a *.lrtemplate.

You can then import it by right mouse clicking on a Preset folder within Lightroom, selecting Import, and navigating to your newly created file.

I'd be interested to know if anybody finds this useful.

Personally, I find it more useful than Auto Tone for quick editing photos. For hero images, I'll tend to leave it alone and do things manually.

I'm getting an error message when I try to import the file that says, "The preset file was the wrong type of preset.", Is this NOT a develop preset?

Maybe because I'm using Textedit on a Mac and it wants to save it as an RTF format file???

EDIT...Nevermind, I got it. I had to go into TexEdit prefs and change the file format from RTF to Plain Text. There must of been some kind of hidden formatting, etc. that LR didn't like in the file. Just changing the extension from RTF to lrtemplate did not make it compatible. I just created a new text doc after changing the prefs and copied/pasted the code into the new doc and saved over the top of the old file.

It seems to be kind of cool. I like it better than Auto Tone, as Auto Tone seems to favor a brighter exposure. I really like highly saturated photos, so I lean more toward pics being on the darker side. This seems like a good starting point.

Bob

MarkR

rockingcpa wrote: »

It seems to be kind of cool. I like it better than Auto Tone, as Auto Tone seems to favor a brighter exposure. I really like highly saturated photos, so I lean more toward pics being on the darker side. This seems like a good starting point.

Bob

It's definitely a hit-or-miss preset. But it's fast enough to apply, then undo if you don't like where it took your picture.

basflt

thanks for tip
this is really handy for creating user presets [ or modify existing ones ]

den_s

I like the idea of this and will give it a try. Thanks!