I was tasked to photograph a group of High School athletes and turn their images into the popular Sport Grit effect they saw me create with a group of college athletes. The shoot went as planned, however, when I applied my Sport Grit Lightroom preset, the images didn’t look right. I realized, the college athletes were much older and didn’t have blemishes like the High School athletes did. This caused my preset problems. I realized if I removed their blemishes and smooth their skin, I would get the same results. Instead of manually editing each image, I turned to Perfectly Clear for help. This tutorial teaches batch processing, I just happen to use Perfectly Clear.

Batch Processing with Perfectly Clear

A powerful feature of Perfectly Clear is the ability to batch process a group of images all from within Lightroom. Instead of manually enhancing the eyes and skin and removing blemishes for each image, we can select a group of images to process and apply a Perfectly Clear preset.

Inside Lightroom, select the images you want to process with Perfectly Clear. Click on the File menu and choose Export.

The export windows title shows three files will be exported. Apply the following settings:

  1. Select Athentech Perfectly Clear from the Export To dropdown menu.
  2. Navigate to a default preset or a custom preset you created under user preset. Place a checkmark in the Hide Perfectly Clear Window box.
  3. Choose Export to the same folder as the original photo from the Export Location dropdown menu.
  4. Select TIFF for the image format, ProPhoto RGB as the color space and 16 bit for bit depth.
  5. Click Export when finished.

Lightroom prepares to export the images using the Perfectly Clear preset we created. A dialog box will appear when the images have been successfully exported.

Applying Lightroom Preset

The images will appear in the Lightroom catalog next to the original. From here, select the images and apply the Sports Grit preset from the Quick Develop dropdown menu to complete the effect.

In no time at all, batch processing in Lightroom applied my preset and gave me the look I was after.