Charlie Stout Writes About: Everything

If you’re like me, you choose Adobe Lightroom for your digital photography workflow and you’ve probably created and/or downloaded several development presets and you probably spend a lot of time clicking on them or hovering over them to see what a particular shot might look like with each preset applied.

Unfortunately, this is a time-consuming process.  My problem with the current Lightroom method of previewing presets is that it requires a 1:1 distribution of effort to output: for every preset you view, you must take an action to initiate that view – whether it be clicking on the preset name or hovering over it in the list and monitoring the Navigator. This takes precious time away from your life which could be spent anywhere but in front of the computer.  I would like to see the ratio of effort to output optimized with regard to managing development presets, and I have figured out a way to do it.

I propose that the ninjas on the Lightroom team include a “Preset Grid” view, allowing you to view one image from your collection in a contact sheet-like grid, with all of the presets in your collection applied in the order in which they would naturally appear.

In the screenshot below, we see a portrait of my friend Ira looking particularly normal in the first photo in the grid, which is the “negative” or the original, unedited shot.  Instead of seeing a grid containing Ira’s entire shoot as we would in the Library module, the “Preset Grid” view gives us oversight of what this single highlighted shot of Ira would look like if we were to apply each develop preset in our collection to that image.

At the bottom of the screen we see a thumbnail strip showing all of the presets as well.  That probably isn’t really the best behavior for the thumbnail strip in this case – it should actually behave just as it always does, showing a thumbnail of each negative from the shoot to allow navigation through the folder.

With my proposed “Preset Grid”  we can scroll down through a grid of images which correspond to each development preset.  The number of images you see in the grid for your original image will always be the same: if you have 100 presets, you will always have a grid of 100 images to look at for the overview.

It might take a short while for your computer to generate all these thumbnails, but it’s possible that in the long run it could save you hours of clicking and scrolling through an ever-growing list of presets.  That’s for the ninjas to decide.