The power of presets

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Hi everyone, I thought I would share some blogging ‘behind the scenes’ style content on here as it’s something I find really interesting to read! I get asked a fair bit about how I edit my photos and what software I use. I have dabbled with lots of different types of editing but for me the easiest way for me to get the style of photo I want is to use a preset. A preset is essential a filter in it’s rawest form. They are mostly available to use with Lightroom and are named just like a filter, the only difference being that you can see the different elements behind the preset in your lightroom editing area (so you can still adjust things like warmth/contrast/exposure etc)

Another great feature of presets is that you can use them on your computer and you can use them via the lightroom app on your phone which means you can seamlessly tie in your blog photos and your social media content together with the same editing style, this is something that’s quite important to me as I like to have a specific look/theme running across all of my social media (especially as the instagram grid is featured in my footer) and this means I can edit my photos on the go as I don’t always have access to my laptop and I hate having to wait to get home to edit the photos before I can publish a post.

Editing photos can be a real challenge, especially if like me your a bit of a photography novice and it honestly took me quite a few years to get into the rhythm of things. I love photography but it’s not something that came naturally to me and for a long time I thought it was my photos that weren’t good enough because they didn’t have the same look as other bloggers/influencers. Now I realise it’s because everyone was using a presets on their photos to get their specific look but I would spend hours and hours trying to take photos with different lighting and never getting them to look just how I wanted them!

Presets can be quite expensive and it can take a little while to find ‘the one’ for you and your blog/instagram style so I was really excited to find these 2 high quality presets available for free, for both lightroom desktop and the mobile app versions! Beautifully warm toned with a slightly romantic and dreamy like style (with that very on trend polaroid style grainy finish) these 2 are firmly in my ‘travel presets’ list now.

Here are some before and afters of the presets in action:

One little life hack I picked up is that if you like the presets you have but find you tweak them slightly by adding warmth/contrast or exposure then you can save those changes as their own preset too which means you can have a whole collection tailor made for your content. If you are a new blogger or instagrammer or just looking to up your photography game these two presets are a fantastic way to get you started, if you download the presets make sure you send me some links to your photos using them!