Need Help with Lightroom - Cuba Gallery

[CatfishSoupFTW]

alright, so i refuse to drop money on some presets, and i have been trying to do this in lightroom, as they claim they do as well.

http://lightroomtutorials.blogspot.co.nz/

but how do i this? I just cant seem to do it. look at their befores and afters and its pretty damn good from the originals at times.

do you guys know how? or maybe have some presets to share? i would like to study them and see but i cannot find any results on google.

any help i would appreciate.

[distant.star]

I see things that make me suspect it wasn't all done in LR.

Can't offer any more than that.

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I did not see anything that could not be done manually in Lightroom, get a good book and learn how to use it, or buy the preset (IMHO, a waste of money, since you learn nothing from a preset).

You can change the color hue, brightness, saturation individually for each color, you can use the brush to lighten, darken, blur, etc any area, the possibilities are endless, but you need to know what the tools do, and how to use them.  Discovering by trial and error is great, but you will need a lot of time, and will still miss some important features.

[AndreeOnline]

He or she uses the graduated filter tool (what ever the name is- shortcut key is 'm') to make local adjustments, but above all add color casts.

You can do the same by pressing the 'k' key and brush in your strokes for even more refined adjustments.

Once you activate any of those tools you have a color box at the bottom of the adjustments pane. Click there and add a color cast of choice.

Of course... to get quality results you need to have quality eyes... and a sense of esthetics, I guess...

[sb]

Catfish, as someone who has spent an enormous amount of time developing my own lightroom presets, I can tell you that the canned "one click" magic bullet presets not only do not work most of the time, but when they do work, they make your images look too "cookie cutter".

The problem is that every image is unique. Someone else has developed a look custom tailored to their own image taken in a particular light, and when you just apply it to your own image, you'll often walk away disappointed simply because your image is different.

You have to learn to use Lightroom tools to build your own look from scratch. Once you are a master at this, you can save you favorites as presets. But don't attempt to batch apply other people's presets as-is, it will never work well.

Each one of those images you posted had slightly different things done to it. Common things I'm seeing in those examples are:

1. Hue of blues was frequently moved towards cyan (HSL control in Lightroom). I'm not a fan of cyan skies to be honest with you, but if you like it, go nuts :-)
2. Luminosity of greens was increased in the first picture (HSL control)
3. To get dramatic skies, a negative exposure graduated filter was used on the sky in conjuction with the luminosity decrease on the blues.

Find your own image that most closely resembles the image that you are trying to reproduce. Then go slowly and pay attention to how original colors have changed in the final image. It won't take long to nail it.

[Benighted]

There are a lot of nice videos on youtube actually, where they tell what, and why they do it, a lot better than a preset that don't teach you much. A quite nice start for basic techniques for landscape photos is Lightroom 3 Tutorial - Editing a RAW file