One slider post processing...nearly

For those reading this post in future years you will need to first remember that the global pandemic of 2020 is fully underway, and yours truly, like everyone else, is locked down.

One benefit of the situation is that we all find ourselves with a lot of time on our hands and, for me, that means I have spent many hours refining my post processing workflow.

I have not, however, done this on my own. Over the years I’ve been informed by many web teaches: through free education and paid. Some names I could mention are: Sean Bagshaw; Mark Metternich; Matt Kloskowski. I thank them for passing on their knowledge.

The other thank you must go to Adobe, for evolving Lightroom into a really good post processor. Factor in Photoshop and you have a really first class duo.

So what I have done is compress/merge/fuse my ideas with all those mentioned above, and others, into a single preset, that I call ‘Garry’s Magic Preset’.

To use the preset, once you have ingested the image into Lighroom, is a simple twostep process.

• Go to the develop module and select Garry’s Magic Preset. 
• Adjust the exposure slider and WB until the image looks OK for further processing.

That’s it.

To illustrate the power of the preset, let’s look at an image I captured, handheld, in Quebec in 2013. As usual for me, ETTRed.

This is the image having pressed my preset. Yes, I know, it looks worse!

However, this is the image after simply adjusting one slider, the exposure slider.

Of course, this is only the start of the post processing. From here, I would adjust colour, possibly via Lightroom LUT profiles, and do local adjustments in Lightroom, including using the ‘quasi-luminosity’ masking that is now in LR. None of which I’m doing in this post.

I hope you have enjoyed this short post and, as usual, I welcome feedback of any kind.