In a previous posting, David Miller punctuated some great points regarding traveling with presets and templates This topic goes hand-in-hand with James Davison’s tips for keeping things straight using multiple catalogs.

When working in collaboration with other editors, our team exports and imports catalogs on a daily basis as we process and deliver projects for numerous studios. One topic we discuss continually is the creation and sharing of presets during our workflow. The great thing about the Develop Module (one of the GREAT things) is that as you work with images you can save adjustments as presets and further automate your work as you go. You can say these presets are built ‘at run time’ and what happens is you are left with a lot of catalog-specifc presets that are only available to that particular catalog.

I think an entire article could be committed to the particular global settings that can be set in Lightroom but for now we’ll focus on making sure that any catalog-specific presets created during your workflow are included in the exported catalog from Lightroom.

First, select Edit>>Preferences … in the menu bar:

… and check Store presets with catalog

Now this may seems as basic as it gets to an individual who works exclusively with their own catalogs and in their own closed-loop workflow. Once you extend that model to a collaborative environment where multitudes of people import and export a common catalog of images the need track and implement proper settings across the organization becomes crucial.

In reference to David Miller’s entry above, you can leverage his tips to take these catalog-specifc presets, and package them up into a common location for anyone to grab and use in their workflow - without having to remember which catalog they came from.

Until next time … happy shooting!

|Brandon Oelling