Rock pillars
As Paul Burwell writes about in a recent post on things annoying to a wildlife photographer – weddings can be much scarier to photograph than some of the largest predators around. I happen to agree with him. 
But wedding and portrait photographers certainly have an arsenal of processing tips and tricks to provide some unique images for their clients that we don’t need to be afraid of. Just because a series of processing steps were designed for a wedding portraiture, it doesn’t mean they cannot be helpful for processing photographs of different subject matter.
Such is the case recently when I downloaded a Lightroom preset called “Alice’s Less Bright Dress” from Presets Heaven. I applied this preset to some landscape images from Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, and really liked the initial tonality the settings created. Quite often the preset defaults don’t get you to the end result right away – but they at least point you in a direction. A direction in which you might not have
Mineral stains
considered before. For these couple of images, I started with the ALBD preset in Lightroom – then in Photoshop applied some luminosity masks, and did some small tweaks in a selective color adjustment layer. The final images have a bit of a different look to them that I thought looked nice.
Not so scary afterall. A reminder to myself that the huge bucket of photography tools, whether it is a lens, composition strategy, or processing techniques have broad reaching applications beyond their original intention.
EDIT: A before / after shot of the first image is below per request. …
Before only using LR adjustments / After with LR Preset + PS Adjustments
Is there any possibility that you might show the “before” versions? I looked at the before and after shots at the linked site, but I am quite curious about the difference in your pictures. Wonderful detail and colors in these.
I added a B/A shot Anita. As you can see, the effects basically gave me a launch point to continue with some subtle PS work. I liked how the pillars now stood out from the b/g more.
I’ve only recently stated trying some presets in Lightroom…some of them definitely do produce interesting and pleasing results. Thanks for sharing this info.
Thank you for taking time to show this. This is much more satisfying than imagining the impact of the actions. The differences are subtle yet profound, aren’t they? The depth in both of these final images is amazing.
I am really digging the final result Mark. The photo was good to begin with but it looked to add a little more depth.
Laurie, your welcome.
Thanks Richard!