What is the Difference Between Lightroom Presets & Profiles

Presets

Lightroom Presets are like shortcuts enabling users to apply fixed (absolute) edit settings with a single click. A preset replaces the existing slider or default settings. They can also include local adjustments.

Profiles

Lightroom profiles create a look or style and sometimes emulate a film stock. They sit on top of other adjustments but never change your edit settings, rather like a filter. This makes it possible to experiment with different looks without affecting your workflow. If you decide to tweak the slider settings they will then be relative to the applied profile.

This opens up opportunities to do things not normally possible in Lightroom such as using a profile with a 3D Lookup Table (LUT)

Lightroom has supported camera profiles for quite a while but they were hidden away in the calibration panel and were not widely used. Adobe has now moved them to the top of the Develop tools and has introduced a profile browser which can be viewed as a list or as thumbnails.

Current

Previous

Many creative profiles have an amount slider. This works a bit like opacity, allowing more or less of the profile effect to be applied. A 3D LUT is complex, mapping all color values together in a three-dimensional cube. It is possible to create cube LUT files in Photoshop or using dedicated software from developers like 3DLutcreator.com

My own free Lightroom profiles are in the XMP format ready to be imported. Download and installation instructions are given at the link below for Windows & Mac. 

Get Free Profiles

Lightroom Classic Update

Adobe has announced a dot release quickly on the heels of Lightroom Classic 8.3 following customer feedback. Version 8.3.1 fixes the following issues:

Unable to export from Lightroom Classic V8.3: The specific folder is not writable.

Export Video as Original fails to create file.

Lightroom Classic can be updated from the Apps tab in Creative Cloud.

Flat-Field Correction

This feature is now built directly into Lightroom Classic following the v8.3 update. It’s a specialist tool to address vignetting and color fringing seen with certain lenses.

“The standard way to fix shading is with a calibration photo. While taking a regular photo, you can also shoot a reference or calibration frame with the same optical set-up, at the same time. You can then use Flat-Field Correction in Lightroom Classic to automatically detect and analyze the calibration frame and remove the light falloff and color cast from the corresponding photo or batch of photos”

N.B. your original raw file is replaced in the catalog with a corrected DNG file although your original remains on disc. I think it would have been a better design to stack the new DNG and original together.

If your original raw file is already in the DNG format the replacement DNG will have -2 appended to the file name.

 

This feature is accessed from the Lightroom Classic Library after selecting thumbnails and the reference thumbnail. 

Choose Library >> Flat-Field Correction

See this Adobe help document for full details:

Using Flat-Field Correction

The following link has an in-depth appraisal of Flat-Filed Correction, written by respected reviewer Sean Reid.

Reid Reviews