For quite a while now I have used Lightroom as my main editing software. Its a great tool that I like quite a bit.
For 99% of my editing I create and save my own presets. Of course I have received some preset collections from friends and other photographers in the past but at best I tweak them to my own specifications or I never use them more than once.
Recently Sleeklens contacted me and asked if I would like to give some of their presets a tryout. Since I normally create my own I thought it would be fun to test.
I decided to run the presets through some of my more difficult shots. Ones that I was having problems getting to look just right. Shots with cloudy or non textured skies, misty and foggy landscapes and cityscapes.
To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by most of the presets. While I didn’t use all of the presets I had at my disposal (I tended to stay with the ones that adhere to my style of processing) It was a lot of fun going though the presets and seeing how they worked on my images.
I have added the before and after versions of each photo to show what the presets from Sleeklens are capable of. Please keep in mind though that I did do a little fine tuning on each of the final images but the base preset to get the look was all Sleeklens.
I have added a description of the presets used on each of the images posted.
Top Before Processing Bottom after
In the above photo we can see that the colour is fairly muted. To start I used one of my own basic presets for the base conversion. After removing a lot of dust spots (mirrorless cameras get spotty fast) I then layered the Sleeklens ttw|1 Base cinematic Preset. It really made the blue that I saw that night in the sky pop and the lights of the city become vibrant and clear.
In this shot I wasnt happy with my own black and White conversions. The sky was too flat in all of them and the colour version just wasn’t working.
Rather than fight with it I went straight to the Sleeklens preset “all in one – Pressed in time”
After that some adjustments to the shadows and a few more touch ups here and there and you get the dark gritty black and white seen in the second photo. Not a bad result.
This shot was particularly difficult to get any texture in the sky to come out with my own presets. But they did give me the basic tone I wanted. So I needed something to really make the sky show some texture. Sleeklens to the rescue. This time in the form of some of their gradient filters. In particular “cloudy sky definition” I tend to shoot a lot of landscape photos. And Im not always in the mood for a sunny sky. Clouds add drama. however they are not always willing to work with you to create the perfect sky. The muddieness of the the original sky made it really hard to get the mood I wanted. To the naked eye there was a lot of spooky mood to the scene, But I couldn’t bring it out in post. After a few adjustments to the temperature I felt it came out pretty close to what I was seeing when I made the original shot.
For my final example a Classic sunset shot. I was curious to see how the presets provided would compare to my usual edits on Pretty sunset shot. Aside from the obvious lightening of the original scene, I found the Sleeklens preset “cloudy sky definition” came to the rescue again. While i liked my original finished edit I was quite impressed by the results with that particular graduated filter. The colours came out better than I could have imagined. And all without being overblown or too bright. Well done!
In the coming weeks I will be working one a few more images from my archive that I want to try out with the Sleeklens profiles. There are a lot of the presets I have not tried yet and I am anxious to give them their time to shine.
However, for now. I can say without a doubt, these are a great set of presets. Well done Sleeklens.
If you are interested in picking up a set of your own sleeklens presets hop on over to their website located here https://sleeklens.com/product-category/lightroom-bundles/