If you have read much material on creativity, you have probably heard the term ‘releasing your inner child’ or something like it. Quite often people refer to the creativity in children because they have not developed some of the mental roadblocks of ‘how things should be’ as many adults have. Certainly a big part of the experience of being a kid is play. Even for myself, sometimes I feel I need that extra push to see something that is there, but I am just not realizing it. Sometimes you just have to get out in the playground and play. It can be difficult to do however, if you view some of the tools in front of you as simply ‘more work.’

This is why presets are such a wonderful thing, and particularly in Adobe Lightroom – they couldn’t get any easier to use. For those of you not familiar with Lightroom, it has a RAW file converter module called Develop. It allows non-destructive editing of not only camera RAW files, but any other image format as well. Within this area is a full panel where you can store presets – saved tweaks of the many settings you can utilize in Lightroom. You simply select an image to bring into the Develop area, and mouse over the various presets in the list to get a preview of what the effect looks like. I will often just run down the list with my mouse if there is an image I know has potential, but exactly what isn’t immediately in my mind. You can run through hundreds of different versions in less than a minute, selecting something that catches your eye. It is really a great tool to help you visualize some of the potential in an image without having to go through a lot of steps to realize it.

This is what happened for me with some recent ice pattern images I shot. The raw file straight out of the camera is rather flat and uninteresting. But I knew in the field that I would be tweaking these to bring out more contrast to highlight the patterns. I also happened to download recently a preset called ‘300’ – named after the movie which I really liked. Sometimes you just download these things as you come across them, with hope that someday they will prove valuable for a certain shot. It just so happened that this preset gave these ice patterns a great look. The linked image here shows a before and after view. That is another fun aspect about them. You might find presets developed for fashion or landscape, and be able to apply them to something entirely different.

If you are not using Lightroom, perhaps your own software has some preset features to it. Photoshop has numerous plugins that do similar things, but none that I have found that are as easy to apply as in Lightroom. And with Lightroom’s virtual copies – you can create multiple versions of a particular image without creating entirely new files and taking up disk space. So for me, Lightroom has become one of my playgrounds.