Lightroom Preset: Warm Forest

I'm not using presets in Lightroom a lot; most of them qualify as "tools", like White Balance, my preferred Split Toning for monochrome edits, that sort of thing.

But every now and then, hand-crafting a photo ends up with a pleasant look that I wish to be able to recreate. Such as this one (and no, it doesn't happen all too often;). It's a preset with a hearty amount of color manipulation and Split Toning on top of it, and I found it works best for forest or at least groups of trees where the dominating colors of the source material are green/yellow and brown/red. Check it out:

The tiny little ZIP archive (right-click, Save Link As) contains two versions: one plain preset, the other one with Lightroom's Auto Toning. Unzip the files and add them to Lightroom: switch to the Develop module, expand the Presets section in the left-hand sidebar, right-click and select Import from the pop-up menu.

As usual, the preset is merely a starting point, you should adjust Tone, Tone Curve etc. to your liking. The majority of tweaks is in the HSL panel and Split Toning. Feel free to tweak and mangle!

If you find it useful and want to buy me ice cream (well, not directly...) just click on one of the friendly ads below this post and/or at the bottom of the blog page. They don't bite. :P

Status Update

First, a belated Happy New Year to all of my readers here! I just wanted to post some quick notes here about what's going on...

Just like in 2010, I compiled My Personal Top 10 photos from 2011, now on my other website/blog - which I intend to turn into my personal photography diary and perhaps also a hiking blog for the San Diego area. Since I make most of my Landscape and Nature photography during our hikes, I might as well combine the results. It gives me a reason to blog more or less regularly too - except perhaps in the Summer months, when it's too hot to hike in Southern California. :) That on the other hand should give me a chance to cull my ever-growing photo library, organize and keyword the images, that sort of thing... I guess that qualifies as a New Year's resolution, no? :)

And since we're officially a business by the name of Daylight Colors now, I will transfer the portfolio part away from my personal website to our new website which I hope to build in the coming days and weeks - it will combine both of our photographic output were it fits (it's kind of funny when we switch cameras for the sake of convenience anyway), and will hopefully be better and easier to maintain my overly enthusiastic combination of Google+ posts, the Picasa Web Albums API, and Blogger. It's safe to say that it is not as charming as I had hoped for, mostly because of my limited competence in doing more customizations to the Blogger templates, but also the shortcomings of the Google+/PWA combination...

Stay tuned. :)