Men wear traditional Chinese clothing outside a temple in Taiwan. X-equals preset Fuji Velvia 100 @ 80 was used in processing

At the beginning of last month I discussed the use of Develop Presets in Lightroom. Presets are something that I use all the time in my workflow they dramatically cut down on my processing time. I love that they are adjustable and I can go in and tweak them if a particular preset is not quite right for the photograph. One of the sources for presets that I mentioned in that earlier post was X-Equals. They have a few preset collections that they’ve created and today I’m going to take a look at one of them, the Creative Production Presets. This preset collection was put together by X-Equals in collaboration with Life In Digital Film.

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Original image without any presets.

Firstly, I’ll say that this preset collection is great value. All in all, there are over 75 different presets, from film emulation to black and white filters, Holgas to different toning effects. The presets come in four different folders. First up, there’s the Holga presets. The four included here are Holga – Base, Holga – Kodachrome 25,
Holga – T-Max and Holga – Panatomic: A Holga Base preset that also includes a Panatomic X emulation.

Holga presets. (L-R) Base, Pantomic, T-Max, Kodachrome

The monochrome toolkit folder contains 27 presets including film simulation, color filters, paper grades, toning presets and a print preset. Most of these are fairly self-explanatory to anyone who comes from a film background but for those of you who are only familiar with digital, you may want to experiment a bit to get an idea of what they can do.

Color Filters. (L-R) yellow, red, purple, orange, magenta, green, blue

Paper presets (L-R high-low contrast) VC5, VC4, VC3, VC2, VC1, VC0, VC00

Film emulations includes a series of different films, including both color and black & white. These are some of my favorites, particularly the Fuji Velvia 100 @ 80 that the opening image uses, and the Kodak Pantatomic as seen below.

Kodak Pantatomic X 1986 preset

Finally, there are the creative presets which include such things as Polaroid, Hard Depth, Negative simulations, Kodachrome and one that I’ve been using a lot lately, Stark Raging Black.

Kodachrome 10 Auto

Stark Raging Black preset

Many of the presets come in three flavors, with the straight preset, straight preset plus auto, and straight preset plus a tone curve. I’ve created a quick Soundslides Plus slideshow with a version of every preset in the collection. Make sure you have the captions on so that you can identify what is what.

The X-Equals Creative Production presets make for a very smooth workflow. You can get them from the X-Equals store for $14.99. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be reviewing the other X-Equals preset collections as well.

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