Creating an adaptive Lightroom landscape preset

Presets — one-click editing recipes — are a great way to speed up your post processing workflow. They can help minimize repetitive actions, and once you dial in a specific “look” you can easily style a series of photos.

In this article I’ll walk you through the steps to create a Lightroom Classic landscape preset that, not only improves the overall image, but leverages AI to separately target the sky and the foreground.

A Stormy Day in Joshua Tree National Park

We’ll start with a series of photos that were captured on a cloudy day in Joshua Tree National Park. I failed to check my white balance settings (oops!) when I started shooting in the near-dark early morning, so most images from this session have a cool blue color cast. I want to correct the color, bring out texture in the clouds, and add clarity and contrast to the rocks in the foreground.

Global adjustments

We’ll start with three global adjustments — Lens Corrections, White Balance and Auto Tone.

1. Lens Corrections

Start with Lens Corrections. Correcting lens distortion is particularly important when working with images captured using a wide-angle lens. This series was captured with a 16-35mm lens so there is considerable distortion that needs to be corrected.

2. White Balance

Next, we’ll address the cool blue color cast using the White Balance tool in the Basic section.

3. Auto Tone

We’ll use Lightroom’s Auto Tone to give a better starting point for adjusting exposure and contrast.

Masking

The image is already looking remarkably better, but we can further improve it by targeting specific adjustments for the sky and the rocks in the foreground. Open the Masking tool and choose Select Sky.

Click on the … next to the sky mask, and choose Duplicate and Invert Mask. This will create a new mask that targets the foreground of the image.

Now we can make additional changes for the sky and foreground independently.

Adjust the sky

Select Mask 1 that targets the sky. Using the sliders in the right panel, adjust the sky as desired. For this image:

• Exposure — slightly darken the sky
• Highlights — tone down the brightest areas
• Clarity — increase overall definition and appearance of detail
• Saturation — slightly reduce the overall amount of color

Adjust the foreground

Select Mask 1 Inverted that targets the foreground. Using the sliders in the right panel, adjust the foreground as desired. For this image:

• Contrast — add definition between light and dark areas
• Highlights — tone down brightest areas
• Texture — increase appearance of fine detail
• Clarity — increase overall definition and appearance of detail
• Saturation — slightly increase the overall amount of color

Finishing touches

The last step for most of my images is to add a subtle Vignette. Close the Masking tool, scroll down to Effects, and add a soft Vignette to darken the edges of the frame.

Save a preset

Now that we have an image edited, saving a preset will enable quick and easy edits for the remainder of the series. Open the Presets panel on the left and click the + icon to create a new preset.

Create a name for your preset, then tick the box for Auto Settings and Masking.

Using Your Lightroom landscape preset

Select the next image in the series, and apply your new preset. Lightroom will recalculate the mask for the new image to target the sky and foreground.

With the help of my Lightroom landscape preset, I was able to quickly move through the remaining images in the series. The masks recalculated for each image, allowing me to perform complex edits in seconds.

Apply complex edits, fast

Presets are a great way to speed up your post processing workflow. Lightroom’s addition of adaptive presets that allow AI masks to be saved and recalculated for each image make creative editing faster and easier than ever before.