Lightroom Classic tip: Create smart presets

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Last year, Lightroom Classic gained lots of useful automatic masks. These can speed up your workflow considerably. Combine automatic masks with presets to edit your photos in no time.

With a smart mask, you can automatically select the pupils in a portrait, for example, to sharpen them slightly. Or the background to make it a little darker. Or soften the skin.

Because Lightroom makes the selection for you, it saves you a lot of time. With just a few clicks, you can quickly create several useful selections in your photo.

With an average portrait photo, I often quickly create around five different smart masks, each making a small improvement to the portrait. That is reasonably quick, but you have to do it again for every photo.

There is, however, a useful way to create these masks even faster. Take a portrait, or a landscape, which works just as well as an example, and create as many smart masks as you often use in your photo editing.

Give each smart mask a clear name. That way, you can immediately see exactly what each mask does.

Also apply other edits that you often use to your photo. For example, add a vignette or bring down the highlights slightly.

Have you applied all the smart masks and standard edits you could think of? If necessary, with only minimal adjustments. Then the next step is to create a preset from this photo.

Tick all the settings you have adjusted. Above all, do not forget to include the masks in your selection. Give the preset a clear name, such as 'Portrait standard'.

Whenever you edit a portrait photo, you can start with this preset. It applies your basic corrections, but also immediately creates all the smart masks with the settings you chose.

It is easy to adjust an existing mask. In any case, it saves you the time of creating all those separate smart masks.

A useful way to save a lot of time when editing your photos.

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