How to use Lightroom’s one-click effects

In this tutorial we’ll get to know Lightroom’s presets and virtual copies and start experimenting with a variety of one-click effects.

If, like most people, you don’t really want to have to spend hours in front of your computer, sorting and editing your photos, then there are lots of ways to speed up your workflow with Lightroom.

Presets are essentially recipes of various settings that you can save and apply to other images. The way Lightroom is designed makes it perfect for presets because Lightroom is not a pixel-altering editor; instead it simply changes the way that an image is displayed in the software.

So increase exposure by +1 and that change is stored as an extra bit of data alongside the image, rather than a permanent change.

Not only does this make Lightroom a great editor for Raw files (as Raw data can’t be altered), it also means that the changes made to one image can easily be applied to others, or even a whole set at once.

Get into the swing of using presets and you can save yourself a lot of time. But there’s also another benefit to the way Lightroom edits your images.

We can create duplicates of an image within the program, without having to make space-consuming extra copies on our hard drive. Lightroom calls these ‘virtual copies’, and they’re very useful for experimenting with different treatments. Here’s how presets and virtual copies work…

01 Try a preset
Drag images into the Library module and hit Import. Select the images you want to work on then head to the Develop module. Go to the Presets panel on the right and try a few out, like ‘Split Tone 4’ here, found in the ‘Lightroom B&W toned presets’ folder.

02 Make your own tone
We can alter the preset to make our own, customized version. In the Split Tone panel, try out different colours for the highlights and shadows. Head to the Basic panel and adjust the tones – we’ve increased Shadows and Clarity and decreased Highlights.

03 Create a preset folder
When you’re happy with your split-tone effect, it’s time to save it as a preset. We’ll start by making a new folder to keep things organized, so right-click over the existing presets in the Presets panel on the left and choose New Folder, give it a name, and hit Create.

04 Save a preset
Click the plus icon in the Presets panel. It’s worth only selecting the parameters we’ve altered, so that when we apply the effect to other images it won’t reset any other values. Give the preset a name, choose your new folder in the drop-down menu, then hit Create.

05 Try on another image
We can now apply the effect to other images. Select one from the filmstrip, or Ctrl-click to highlight several, then go to the Preset panel and click on the preset to apply it. You can also add presets while importing images, or in the Quick Develop Library panel.

06 Create spot colour copy
What if we want to try another effect, perhaps a spot colour? Go to the filmstrip, right-click the image and choose Create Virtual Copy. Click the Reset button then grab the Adjustment Brush. Set Saturation -100, then paint over everything but the boat.

Final Tip
To keep your library tidy, click the number icon over a thumbnail to collapse all virtual copies into a single thumbnail

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