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The Top 40 Free Lightroom Presets

Most web and graphic designers use Photoshop on a daily basis as one of the main tools of the trade. Photoshop is incredibly powerful for designing and for photo editing, but Adobe also has Lightroom, which can be used for processing/editing photos and for the organization of photo files.

As a designer you probably work with a lot of images, including those provided by clients, purchased stock photos, free stock photos, and possibly even your own photos. Because designers work with so many photos, and because many designers are also photography enthusiasts, Lightroom has become increasingly popular even outside of the circles of just professional photographers.

Also helping to boost Lightroom’s popularity is its inclusion in Adobe’s Creative Cloud. If you have a Creative Cloud subscription for software like Photoshop and Illustrator, you also have access to Lightroom.

The early versions of Lightroom included basic functionality for editing photos, but the Library Module for organizing photos was equally important. Since photographers, even hobbyists, can easily build up an archive of thousands of photos, keeping them organized is essential. But over the years, with each new version, Lightroom’s Develop Module has become increasingly powerful, and Lightroom users find themselves opening Photoshop less and less.

One of the best ways to take advantage of Lightroom’s capabilities, especially if you are just getting started with the program, is to make use of presets.

Lightroom Presets are small predetermined settings files that, once installed, and with just a single click, can be used to apply specific and often stunning effects to your photos instantly. They serve a very similar purpose as Photoshop actions that would be used in Photoshop to apply a specific type of effect to a photo.

Presets can help to speed up your editing workflow, allow you to get amazing effects that you might not be able to duplicate on your own, and they can also serve as an excellent educational resource if you want to learn how to create different types of effects. There are many presets available for purchase, but there are also some that you can download for free.

Finding the best free presets can be a little challenging because you need to weed through a lot of lower quality options as well, so this collection was compiled to showcase some of the best free presets that you can download.

The free Lightroom presets have been organized into the following categories: Film Effects, HDR Effects, Color Effects, Black & White Effects and Vintage Effects.

Free Film Effect Lightroom Presets

These presets will give your digital photos a film-like appearance. These effects are often somewhat subtle, but can help to create truly beautiful photos.

PRO Landscape and Travel Lightroom Presets (Envato Elements)

Starting off our list strong is this collection of Lightroom presets. You will find a total of 15 different presets created to make editing nature, landscape, and outdoor photos easier.

Free Portrait Photography Lightroom Preset (Free)

With the help of this preset, you’ll give your portraits a grittier feel and you can apply it with a single click.

The Editorial Collection v2 (Envato Elements)

If you want to make your photos look like they belong on the cover of a magazine, try this preset. You will find 13 presets compatible with both JPEG and RAW files.

Film-Inspired Lightroom Preset (Free)

This film-inspired Lightroom preset will give your photos a classic film look. You can apply it to all kinds of photos, including landscape, outdoors, portraits, and more.

Film Lightroom Preset (Free)

This is another film-inspired Lightroom preset but the difference is that this set gives your photos a soft, washed out look. Use it to produce an interesting effect on your portrait photos.

Anniversary Lightroom Presets – Volume I (Envato Elements)

This set of presets contains 20 different presets designed with couple, senior, and portrait photography in mind. A few notable features include authentic color tones, moody atmosphere, and film imitation.

The Starter Pack Lightroom Presets Collection (Free)

If you’re just getting started with Lightroom, this preset collection is what you need. It contains several useful presets that will help you enhance your images and improve your workflow.

Sunny Landscape Lightroom Presets (Envato Elements)

Try this preset collection if you like shooting a lot of landscapes, sunrise or sunset photos. The collection comes with 30 different presets that support RAW, NEF, DNG, JPG, and TIFF formats.

Christmas Holiday Lightroom Presets (Envato Elements)

Add a little bit of holiday spirit to all your photos. You will find a grand total of 30 different presets with support for RAW, NEF, DNG, JPG, and TIFF formats.

Vintage Film Lightroom Preset (Free)

Use this vintage preset whenever you need to make your photos appear more vintage. The preset will apply a nice-looking, soft vintage effect that will make your photos stand out.

Grainy Matte Lightroom Preset (Free)

Matte effects are a popular effect for portrait photography and thanks to this preset, you no longer have to create it from scratch each and every time.

Newborn Lightroom Presets (Envato Elements)

This preset collection was designed with newborn photography in mind. A total of 20 presets will add various effects such as soft light, soft black and white, vintage, amazing eyes, and more.

Faded Lightroom Preset (Free)

Try this preset if you want to add a nice-looking faded effect to your photos. This effect works well with a variety of photos, including city scapes, landscapes, outdoors, portraits, and more.

I’m Blogger – 50 Lightroom Presets (Envato Elements)

You will find a grand total of 50 presets, perfect for travel, fashion, lifestyle, food, and other photography styles. Use it to make your blog stand out.

Free HDR Effects Lightroom Presets

Lightroom is great for allowing you to increase the dynamic range of a photo. The most recent version (Lightroom CC) includes a new HDR merge feature, but in order to do that you will need multiple exposures of the same scene. If you are just working with a single photo you can get an HDR appearance with these presets.

UltraPOP Lightroom Presets (Envato Elements)

Add new life to your photos with this UltraPOP preset for Lightroom. The collection contains 20 different presets, each of which adds a unique pop of color to your photos.

HDR Lightroom Preset (Free)

For a more dramatic look, consider using this HDR preset for Lightroom. You will be able to quickly apply all the effects needed to produce a true HDR look.

Flowerage Portrait Presets for Lightroom & ACR (Envato Elements)

These Flowerage Portrait presets for Lightroom are perfect for wedding and art photography. The collection works well with natural light portraiture with lots of greens and flowers.

Cinematic HDR Lightroom Preset (Free)

This is another HDR preset for Lightroom but this time you will get a cinematic look. This preset is perfect for landscape and nature photos and works with Lightroom 4, 5, 6, and CC.

HDR Lightroom Preset (Free)

This HDR Lightroom preset will make any photo appear more somber and works well with portrait photography. You can also tweak the preset to your liking.

Zine Fashion Lightroom Presets – Volume II (Envato Elements)

The Zine Fashion Lightroom presets were designed with fashion, art, and beauty photography in mind. The presets work with Lightroom 4 and higher and support a variety of image formats.

FoodKit – Food Presets for Lightroom & ACR (Envato Elements)

Any food or event photographer will find this preset handy. Not only will you be able to make your photos look yummy, you’ll also be able to speed up your workflow significantly.

Strong HDR Lightroom Preset (Free)

Try this Strong HDR Lightroom preset if you want to make your photos appear bold and dramatic. The preset works with Lightroom 4 and newer versions.

Artistic vol. 3 Lightroom Presets (Envato Elements)

This pack of Lightroom presets contains 26 different presets with artistic look and feel. They are compatible with Lightroom 4 and up and work with both JPG and RAW images.

Autumn Color Boost HDR Lightroom Preset (Free)

Boost the dynamic range and make those fall colors really pop with this Autumn Color Boost HDR Lightroom preset. The preset works with Lightroom 4 and newer versions.

Black & White HDR Lightroom Preset (Free)

This preset makes it easy to apply the black and white effect to any photo and keep the deep, beautiful blacks.

Matte Blogger Presets for Lightroom & ACR (Envato Elements)

In this collection of Lightroom presets, you will find 10 tonal effects that will give your photos a beautiful matte look. The presets supports the RAW image format.

Free Color Effects Lightroom Presets

There are all kinds of options for working with color in Lightroom. With some dull photos you may want to make the colors pop, and in other cases you may want to use a faded effect instead. You can also do things like bring a blue sky to life or enhance autumn colors in a nature photo.

Color Pop Lightroom Preset (Free)

Bring your photos to life by adding a pop of color. This free preset will make the colors in your photos appear more vibrant. The preset works with both RAW files and .jpg files.

Vibrant Landscape Lightroom Preset (Free)

This is another colorful preset for Lightroom, designed to bring your landscape photos to life by making the colors appear more vibrant. The preset works with Lightroom 4, 5, 6, and CC.

Autumn Landscape Lightroom Preset (Free)

Autumn is one of the most colorful seasons and this preset will make those fall landscape photos appear even more lively. The preset is easy to use and adjust to your needs.

Light Leak Lightroom Preset (Free)

Add a nice leak effect to your photos with this free Lightroom preset. The preset works well in combination with vintage effects. It’s easy to apply and to customize to your liking.

Cinema Lightroom Preset (Free)

Make your photos stand out with this free Lightroom preset. It will turn your photos into cinematic masterpieces and you can easily adjust it to your needs.

Intense Warm Lightroom Preset (Free)

As the name suggests, this preset will make your photos appear more intensive and warm them up. It’s a great choice for portrait photos and it works with both Lightroom and Photoshop.

Popper Lightroom Preset (Free)

This preset is a great choice when you need to add a touch of color to your photos without going overboard. The preset works with Lightroom 4 and up as well as with Photoshop.

Soft Pastel Lightroom Preset (Free)

Although you can use this preset with a variety of photos, this soft pastel Lightroom preset works best with portrait and outdoor images.

Soft & Light Lightroom Preset (Free)

Knock two birds with one stone and add a soft look and improve the lighting in your photos with a single click.

Soft Pastel Lightroom Preset (Free)

Add a pastel touch to your photos with this Lightroom preset. It works with Lightroom 4 and up as well as with Photoshop and you can easily customize it.

Elegant Fade Lightroom Preset (Free)

Make your photos appear faded which will give them a nice aged look. The preset works with Lightroom 4 and up and supports both JPG and RAW image formats.

August Sunset Lightroom Preset (Free)

This preset will add a nice hazy summer effect to your photos and is reminiscent of August sunsets. The preset collection is free for personal use.

Faded Lightroom Preset (Free)

Try this faded Lightroom preset if you want to save yourself time and not apply the same filters and effects from scratch every time.

Grace Lightroom Preset (Free)

Make your photos appear more smooth by applying this Grace preset for Lightroom. The preset is free for personal and commercial use and works with Lightroom 4 and up.

Beach Life Lightroom Preset (Free)

Thanks to this Beach Life Lightroom preset, you will add a summer feel to all your photos. This preset works well with outdoors photography and can be tweaked to your liking.

Summer Breeze Lightroom Presets (Free)

Inspired by summer, this Lightroom preset has a soft, vintage touch and applies different light effects to your photos. It’s easy to use and customize and works with Lightroom 4 and up.

Summer Love Lightroom Preset (Free)

The Summer Love is another summer-inspired Lightroom preset that will make your photos appear more warm and bright. Save time and apply this effect with one click.

Free Black & White Effect Lightroom Presets

It’s easy to convert a color photo to black & white in Lightroom, but simple black & white conversions often look dull and uninteresting. To get the most from your black & whites you’ll need to make some other tweaks as well, and these presets will take care of the work for you.

Black & White Lightroom Preset (Free)

This Black and White Lightroom preset was designed for RAW images but works well with the JPG format as well. It will instantly turn your color photos into black and white.

B&W Berkeley (Free)

Not only will this preset turn your photos into black and white, it will also give them a nice vintage effect. The preset is easy to apply and customize.

Free Vintage Effects Lightroom Presets

Want a vintage effect for your photo? That can be done very easily with this selection of excellent vintage and retro presets.

Instant Hipster Lightroom Presets (Free)

Try this Hipster Lightroom preset if you an Instagram-style filter for your photos. The preset works with Lightroom 4 and newer and is the most realistic Instagram preset pack for Lightroom.

Vintage Fade Lightroom Presets (Free)

This preset will fade the colors of the photo and apply a subtle vintage effect. It works with Lightroom 4 and newer as well as with Photoshop.

Vintage Lightroom Preset (Free)

This preset, called Vintage Wash will instantly make your photos feel more retro. The preset works with Lightroom 4 and newer and supports a variety of image formats.

Lavender Lomo Lightroom Preset (Free)

Recreate a lomo look with the help of this Lightroom preset. This preset works with Lightroom 4, 5, 6, and CC versions.

Blondies and Brunettes Lightroom Presets (Free)

This fun collection of Lightroom presets works well with portrait photography and will apply a fun retro look to your photos.

Warm Retro (Free)

Similarly to other Lightroom presets, this collection of presets will add a warm retro look to your photos. The collection supports Lightroom 4 and newer.

Vintage Garden (Free)

This vintage collection of Lightroom presets is a great choice when you need to add a vintage effect to landscape and outdoors photography.

Orange & Green Vintage Clarity Lightroom Preset (Free)

This Lightroom preset will turn your photos black and white and make them appear more vintage at the same time.

The post The Top 40 Free Lightroom Presets appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Looking at an Online School Through a Web Designer’s Eyes

Like so many families around the globe, ours has had to make some difficult decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most agonizing was what to do about school. Should we send our daughter back to traditional school, or should we opt for an online school?

Out of both concerns for safety and consistency, we chose the online program offered by our local school district. It would require some adjustments from all of us, but we felt it was the right path to take – at least for now.

Still, there was a lot we didn’t know in terms of how this virtual school worked. How are parents kept in the loop? How easy would it be for our daughter to use? What would the classes be like?

We’ve now had some experience with this method of learning and are slowly getting the hang of it. With that, I thought it might be interesting to look at things from a web designer’s perspective – one who is also a parent.

Below are some observations based on the particular provider our school district uses. It’s by no means a complete review of online education – just a look at the design and functionality of this one system. And any critiques are just that, as I’m not privy to why certain decisions were made or the limitations involved.

So, how does the experience stack up? It’s a bit of a mixed bag so far.

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Background Information

The virtual academy we’re utilizing doesn’t have live classes. Rather, it’s a mix of videos, testing and interactive features all run through a web browser.

While classes can theoretically be taken at any time, students are encouraged to do their work during normal school hours. That is in part due to the availability of live tutoring help via a chat application.

Both students and parents can keep track of progress, grades and access courses through a portal. A messaging system is included, along with detailed student activity reports.

A Dated, Unintuitive Portal

Upon entering the portal for the first time, I was reminded of the content management systems of yesteryear – as in pre-WordPress. The design is very early-to-mid-2000s, complete with a helping of 3D icons spread throughout.

Of course, compelling design isn’t really the point here. It’s a shared space for parents and students. Both groups can view activity logs, grades and exchange messages with teachers. Students also use it as a gateway to their individual courses as well.

For those tasks, the portal gets the job done. There are some usability issues, though – particularly when it comes to navigation. One can find themselves clicking around in circles due to an ambiguous series of links within the content area. It doesn’t always lead to the expected result.

This may be my biggest pet peeve with the experience. The design doesn’t have to look cutting-edge, but it should at least be intuitive. For something that looks this dated, you’d think that these sorts of bugs would have been ironed out long ago.

Courses Look and Function Well

Easily the most impressive part from a design and functionality perspective, the online courses are first-rate. The look is much more modern and is infinitely more usable than the portal.

Students can view a course “map” that lists the activities they will have to complete that day (as well as those in the future). That includes quizzes and tests, as well as standard lesson material.

It’s easy to navigate. Importantly, students can also go back and review past lessons. There’s also a separate panel for notetaking and the ability to generate some highly-visual reports regarding grading and activity.

If extra help is needed during a lesson, students can click an icon to open up a chat window to speak with a tutor. It’s very similar to what you’d see in a technical support setting, providing students with their place in the queue.

Overall, the UX here is excellent. But if I had one issue, it’s…

Wait, They Still Use Flash?

When first considering the online school, we were provided with a technical requirements document. Among those requirements was the Adobe Flash Player – which is set to go away at the end of 2020. The document was from 2015, so I figured that things must have evolved a bit since then.

Not so fast. There are in fact some interactive games interspersed throughout the courses that still rely on Flash.

And, even though my daughter’s laptop had Flash installed, we still had to specifically enable it in Google Chrome. That’s because it’s deactivated by default as a security measure.

I admit: the games are fun and help reinforce the lessons. But the long-term viability of using Flash is concerning. They’ll need to be ported over to HTML5 or some other technology to still be usable after Flash dies off.

The Lessons for Web Designers

One of my big takeaways from this experience is that web applications have to be revisited again and again. They should be tweaked based on user feedback in order to provide the best possible experience. We’re unlikely to get it right without their help.

Take the aforementioned portal, for example. The fact that it looks dated may be dismaying to a designer – fair enough. But that doesn’t hurt the user experience quite like the navigational shortcomings.

It’s OK, even if a bit unsavory, if a website doesn’t look like it was designed yesterday. What matters is that users can get what they need without confusion. A little bit of cleanup here would do wonders.

This is one of the big challenges of maintaining a legacy system. Various elements need to be periodically refreshed to keep up with the times. Plus, bugs and usability concerns can arise at any time. Designers and developers need to stay on top of them.

The use of Flash here is a prime example. It may have served this online school well for years, but is now likely to cause more problems than it solves. Less tech-savvy parents may not know that the software needs to be enabled or be aware of the security issues it poses. Not to mention what it all means as far as accessibility is concerned. This will make things harder for everyone – potentially impeding a student’s progress.

In addition, this also reinforces the need for simplicity. Sometimes, we can overthink an interface to the point where it’s not intuitive enough. Here, the courses offer that simplistic design while the portal does not. The difference is night and day.

No, it’s not perfect. But overall, we’ve found a lot to like about online schooling so far. Viewing it through a web designer’s eyes, I’ve also learned a thing or two myself.

The post Looking at an Online School Through a Web Designer’s Eyes appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Weekly News for Designers № 559

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Menu to Inner Page Animation with Image Grid Background – Learn the secrets to building a layout with a menu and background image grid that animates to an inner content page.

What Your Clients Need to Know About a Website Redesign – A quality redesign requires both resources and a commitment to making a real improvement.

Totally Mundane™ – A cheeky collection of resources for those who never want to stand out.

10 useful HTML5 features, you may not be using – Some hidden gems to boost your HTML5 projects.

Read Me – An essay for creating and designing good content that people will take the time to read.

How CSS Perspective Works – The concept of perspective, starting with the very basics and working up to a fully animated 3D cube.

The 50 Best Fonts for Creating Stunning Logos – Let one of these stellar logo fonts become a go-to resource in your branding kit.

1 line CSS to center object – This handy tip will both horizontally and vertically center an object on the user’s screen.

How to use CSS clipping – Learn how to create interesting effects with CSS clip-path.

Halfmoon – A front-end framework with a built-in dark mode and full customizability using CSS variables.

BGJar – Create SVG backgrounds for your projects with this free online tool.

Why Some Outdated WordPress Plugins & Themes Are Facing Extinction – A transition of the included jQuery library version could spell the end for some WordPress products.

Unoline Icons Set – Grab this set of icons that use just a single line.

Lo-fi Wireframe Kit – Download this free, robust library of over 100 wireframing components for Figma.

Big Heads – A collection of randomly-generated characters for use in your projects.

10 Free Design Agency Web Templates for Photoshop – Free PSD templates to help inspire your web projects.

design.dev – Download these high-quality, free digital resources to speed up your workflow.

The post Weekly News for Designers № 559 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

New Free SSL Certificate Service: convert your website to HTTPS

Another source of free SSL certs has been added to the Free SSL Certificates for Websites page. If you are wondering what this is all about, such certificates let your website be accessed using HTTPS instead of HTTP. For more information, read How to Move Your Website to SSL (ie, Convert from HTTP to HTTPS).