A recent change to Lightroom is an Advanced Camera Profile that allows you to attach other settings. Now, we can actually import look-up tables, and attach them to our Lightroom presets. This means that a lot of the advanced things you do in PhotoShop can translate to a Lightroom color adjustment. Let me show you how to take the PhotoShop lot, and attach to a Lightroom preset. One of the easiest ways to create a new Lightroom profiles to actually use Adobe Bridge. What you have to do is, select an image, and then right-click, and open that image inside of Adobe Camera Raw.

Attaching a LUT to a Lightroom preset from Photoshop: Advanced Adjustment Layer and Blend Modes by Richard Harrington

This will give you a different user interface to the engine that’s used under the hood inside of Lightroom. Once the image is open, you could take advantage of any adjustments that you want to the image. For example, I can recover the highlights, and lift the shadows a little bit here, a little bit of clarity into the image, and pop the vibrance. And now, simply switch on over to the Presets tab here. You’ll see a lot of different presets.

Now, if you click on the New button, it’s just gonna bring up a standard dialog for saving a preset. If you hold down the Option or Alt key, and click on that New button, it brings up an enhanced dialog. Now, you can choose what’s included in the preset. So, for example, let’s go into a few other tabs here, and apply a little bit of a contrast curve, and some noise reduction here, there we go, a little bit of extra sharpening. I’m just holding down the Option key here as I drag, to view the mask, that looks good, and a little bit of a post-crop vignette, there we go, with some additional feathering to blend it.

Now, let’s go back to that Presets tab. Hold down the Option or Alt key, and then Click on the New Preset. Now, you see you can decide what is included, so the post-crop vignette, you’ll notice that sharpening is not an option, ’cause that’s not adjusting color or tone, so only the tabs that really affect color and tone are included. You can also do some Auto-toning to the image, so that the preset forces the image to be Auto-corrected before it stylizes it.

Now, let’s load a color look-up table. I’m gonna grab the one that I created earlier, the eagle one, and choose Load, and that’s encapsulated into the preset. Now, you can assign a Color Profile like you want, and tell it how to handle the minimum or maximum black and white point, and then just give this a name. I’ll call this Crisp Landscape. And I’ll save it to my User Profiles, and click Okay.

Now, the preset has been saved, and if I go back to my Main tab here and invoke the Profile browser, you’ll see, there it is. Now, you can launch Lightroom Classic as well, and that you’ll find that all of the new presets that you added for Camera Profiles are actually available. So, if I wanna use this landscape look, it’s just a click away. Select the image, and then, in the Develop module, just click on the Profile Browser button.

Now, you can scroll down here to your User Profiles, and if you want, you can also view these here as a grid, or a large icon, and I see there is my new landscape look, so with one click, it is applied to the image and updated, and you’ll notice you do have the ability to adjust its strength here, with the amount slider, which is very cool. So, all of these options here are just a quick click away, and it gives you a lot of flexibility.

So, if you want to make your own custom profiles here, and encapsulate look-up tables in them, it’s a piece of cake, and that’s what we’ve got here. You can just use Adobe Bridge and the Camera Raw module, or the next time you open up a Raw file into PhotoShop, same thing. And then, save your own profile. Remember, it’s as simple as Option + clicking on the New item under Presets, and that opens up a special dialog. So, just make the adjustments that you want on any tab, drop it over to Presets, and Option or Alt + click on the New Item, and this is where you can attach a look-up table, as well as set some other important priorities to lock in the way that your image is developed.

Similar to look-up tables, gradient maps offer a lot of flexibility. Let’s move on now, and take a look at a different way of colorizing, or stylizing, our images, or doing black and white conversion.