The
Alisandra Photography Blog

For so long I struggled to find my editing style. I listened to many people’s talks about “finding your style,” and believe me, I took copious notes! I just didn’t know if what I was doing was visually appealing! So, I would pull up other photographer’s blogs and compare my images to theirs. Is the color the same? Contrast? Black point? Etc? I would also change the look of my photos at least 8 times during a wedding season, editing almost every wedding differently from the last.

I decided that I would make a change last year. I needed to not only develop a classic style that could last over time, but I needed make my workflow less stressful. Beating myself up over the fact that my images didn’t look like someone else’s was getting old and draining. So, I pulled a well exposed image into Lightroom and I edited it the way I liked. I spent time on it, trying different things – some new, some old. And then I made a preset. And from then on, I applied that preset to EVERY IMAGE I brought into Lightroom.

Hover over the Straight Out Of Camera [SOOC] image to see my basic preset applied. [Note that if you are on a mobile device, this feature may not be available to you!]

As you can see, this image changes a ton! But I didn’t spend ANY time editing this photo. I applied the preset at import and BAM. Over the past two seasons, I’ve updated my preset only twice, and the changes were minimal. Having said that, my preset does not alter anything that can’t be applied to every image. If I have a perfect image, I don’t need to change any of the things listed below! In my preset, there are no changes in:

• temperature
• crop
• split toning
• lens corrections beyond “Profile Corrections”

Having an “AlisandraPhoto” preset is something that has taken so much time off of my editing, and I can honestly say that I feel like I have an editing style! Now, for preference sake, I dropped the color temperature of the image a smidge, and it was ready to export. See the final image below! I set up this photo below and had Caroline snap it! This is how excited I was about having my own preset…