Sleeklens Presets
Way back in September last year I received an email from a company called Sleeklens. They provide a large selection of preset packs for Lightroom. This appears to be a growing market with both companies and professional photographers offering their particular ‘recipes’ in order to achieve either a specific look or to allow you to edit your photographs in a similar manner to your favourite pro. The pack that I was sent to review by Sleeklens was their Landscape Workflow.
Presets also allow you to speed up your workflow, for instance if you have a batch of photos that you wish to have edited in the same way you can click on your chosen presets and then sync the edits across the batch of photos.
The presets, like any other option in Lightroom, are customisable should you wish to tweak the look they provide just a little in order to achieve the outcome you desire.
So, with the above in mind how did I find these presets? To be honest I’ve hardly used them. Despite having all of the presets in the workflow available to me I generally found I just preferred to continue to use the Lightroom sliders. Now, whether this is down to the way I’ve learned to use Lightroom, or it’s because the tutorials I’ve watched when learning tended to stick with just what Lightroom offered in the various panels, I’m not sure. It’s just seems to be my personal preference. I’ve also tended to shoot particular scenes with a particular edit in mind rather than digging through presets to see what works best.
Now that isn’t to say that I haven’t spent time playing around to see what I could come up with, below you’ll find a selection of images that I’ve edited using the work flows showing what can be achieved using the Sleeklens Landscape Workflow.
I didn't go out of my way to replicate my original edits with the presets, but I was trying to achieve a look that was as close as possible to my original edit, and therefore vision, for each image. Some come close, some differ in particular areas but I have tried to keep them fairly similar in look and feel.
I can see how presets will speed up a photographers workflow, and there are a myriad of combinations in which they can be applied to achieve a final image. For me though at this time, as I don't generally have a large volume of images to edit at any time with my landscapes, I'll stick to my original editing workflow. However it's good to know that the presets are available should this change and that I can achieve a look that I'm happy with.
If you would like to have a look at the presets then you can find the workflows and tutorials by following the links below;
Sleeklens - Through the Woods Workflow
Sleeklens - Lightroom Presets
Sleeklens - Lightroom Tutorials
