Your Lightroom preset is your editing signature. It includes your color philosophy, your tonal preferences, and the visual style that you are known for and that clients book you for. When you outsource your wedding photo editing, the difference between a gallery that looks just like your work and one that appears generic comes down to sharing that preset correctly. Here’s how to export, share and get the most out of your presets when working with an outside editing team.
Exporting Lightroom Presets
Lightroom makes exporting a preset easy, but you need to do it right so the receiving editor can use the preset without any compatibility concerns.
In Lightroom Desktop, launch the Presets tool, then open the Presets panel. Go to the Yours tab, right-click the preset you wish to export and choose Export from the pop-up menu. Choose a location to save the file, and the preset will be exported as an XMP file. Your editor will need to install and apply your style, and XMP is the universal preset format that works across Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Desktop.
In Lightroom Classic, open the Develop module, right-click the preset you want to export in the Presets panel on the left and select Export. Save the XMP file somewhere you can share.
Export all the preset variations you use routinely, including any scene-specific variations you’ve made for low light, golden hour or interior reception coverage, so your editor has the full toolkit your workflow depends on.
Sharing Presets with an Outsourced Editor
Simply include the XMP files when you submit images and export and share your presets with your outsourced editing crew. The majority of professional editing services will accept presets from shared folders, Dropbox connections, or by uploading your raw images directly.
When distributing, send a short written message with the preset files describing which preset is for a particular scenario. For example, set your outdoor ceremony preset to be the default style, your reception preset to cover low-light situations, and your portraiture preset to apply to all bride and couple photos. The more clearly you define your preset usage, the more correctly your editor can apply it to the entire collection.
If you use different preset strengths for different shots, write down your average Amount slider range. Lightroom’s Amount slider adjusts the strength of the preset from 0 to 200, and your favourite amount is just as much a part of your style as the preset itself.
How Editors Apply Your Preset Style
Your exported XMP files are installed immediately into the Lightroom preset library of a professional editing team and used as a starting point for every image in your batch. This establishes your fundamental look for every image before you make any individual edits.
From here, the editors apply image-specific adjustments to exposure, white balance and tone to compensate for the different lighting circumstances of your wedding photography. The style is set by the setting. The manual corrections are what create the uniformity. They work together to create a collection in which all the images are from the same visual family, no matter when or where in the day they were shot.
Batch Consistency with Shared Presets
Batch consistency is one of the biggest benefits of sharing presets with your editing partner. Your preset is the base for every edit, so the color palette, tonal range and general mood of the gallery are cohesive even across photographs shot in very different lighting settings.
Lightroom’s ability to batch apply your preset means that editors can apply your preset to huge groups of images all at once before making individual modifications, which speeds up the workflow considerably without sacrificing the per-image accuracy that a bridal gallery requires. For a gallery of 600 to 800 delivered photographs, the most effective route to consistent results at scale is to apply the batch application and then perform the individual rectification.
When Presets Need Manual Adjustment
Presets are not the end; they are the beginning. There are some shooting situations where the result your preset will give you will need a lot of manual editing to get the result it will give you on a well-exposed outside photo.
The preset often needs a lot of white balance modification to read properly with reception photographs taken under tungsten or LED lighting. Backlit ceremony photos may require exposure and highlight recovery before the preset tones show up. Scenes with mixed lighting, where natural light and artificial light are competing in the same frame, need to be adjusted on a case-by-case basis, and no preset can predict this automatically.
A smart editing partner understands this and uses your preset WITH the manual edits that each image requires instead of assuming the preset is a full answer. When you brief the editor, be sure to point out that preset application is always followed by per-image correction, and provide any unique situations from the shoot that needed a major departure from your typical preset settings.
Send Your Presets with Every Order
Every photodotedit order comes with your Lightroom presets, which are then used as the base for your gallery edit. Our editors adhere to your specific style, using your presets as the starting point for each image, and then manually adjust everything to ensure the entire gallery is consistent, perfect and ready to go. We match your look on every image we touch, whether you need culling, color correction, retouching, or all three.
Send your settings with your next order and get your first edit free today.
