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Monetizing Presets
As a self diagnosed preset addict, I have spent a great deal of time and energy gathering what I feel to be a great set of presets that my team and I use on a daily basis in our workflow(s).
I think it’s safe to say that presets are some of the most extensible and powerful components of Lightroom. Every week we are reminded by Matt Kloskowski that this is especially true.
In a recent Lightroom group on Flickr an interesting discussion arose around the topic of selling or more specifically reverse engineering a preset. As much time as I have spent in the actual text files that comprise a preset, I still can’t imagine selling my custom created presets to others. Peripheral to this is the issue of intellectual property and who actually ‘owns’ the preset and its associated adjustments.
Case in point; we released our super punch preset for free on our blog on December 5th, 2007. Since then we’ve seen over 1,500 unique visits to this page and over 500 downloads. In those months we have, on numerous occasions, seen the output of this preset on images all over the web - which photographers often share with us. I can’t imagine asking others to pay for this preset, or give us credit for its use.
Suppose I took the Kubota Image Actions, adjusted every action by a few units, and sold them as my own - would I be legally liable to Kubota for infringement? Or, what if I took all the presets I have collected from others and placed them in a link for download directly from this page? Would I be infringing on their work?
We often take for granted the ‘openess’ of the Lightroom community, and it is the discussion of profiting from presets that seems to have struck a chord with many users.
What is your take on this? Should you begin to lay claim, and expect payment for your preset creativity?
Until next time … happy shooting!
|Brandon Oelling
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Comments (4)
Hi Brandon,
As the author of the original flickr post and the article it referred to, perhaps I can chip in with my take on it. (Please bear in mind though my post was not about monetizing of presets - the follow up discussion just turned in that direction because I happened to mention paid-for presets in the post)
Personally the issue of monetizing presets I think comes down to the views of the author of the preset. I would equate it to the Freeware, Shareware and good old expensive Bloatware models that exist in the software industry. Some authors are happy to give their time freely and share their work whilst others wish to make it part of their business model. They are all entitled to do as they wish. People will work for a living and others will give of their time voluntarily. Similarly consider the Creative Commons license model and how it can be applied to our photography if we so wish. Some will have All Rights Reserved - other will happily give away their work.
Speaking personally I have paid for presets and would happily pay for more - IF and this is the key - IF I perceive them as adding value to my workflow and saving ME time. I value my time and think it's worth something. So if someone comes up with a nice bunch of presets that fits my creative needs and saves me the time of having to develop those presets - then I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount.
Notwithstanding that, I am incredibly appreciative of people like yourself you share their presets with the community. So thank you. And thanks to all the others who equally share their work with the community.
I think it's ridiculous to pay for Lightroom presets, and I therefore think it's ridiculous to sell them, or to expect anyone to buy them.
They're just a collection of values for the sliders and related controls. A valuable and time-saving tool to be sure, but I don't believe there is any honest intellectual property being traded here. They're not like Photoshop actions, which are far more complex, and often involve real creativity.
I suspect the market for Lightroom presets grew out of that model, with unwitting consumers just not understanding how simple they are.
What's being bought and sold is the service of creating the preset, something so incredibly easy to do that I find it bewildering that anyone would actually pay for it. But then I am also bewildered that people will pay a "no job too small" handyman to come in and hang a picture on their wall...
But it's a free market -- if there are people willing to buy, and people willing to sell, I'm not going to get in the way. I'm just not going to participate.
Brandon,
I'm not sure if you were around the the forums for the original Public Preview, but if you were you'd have seen me start the first thread for sharing Presets. As there were no attachments on those posts, it was a matter of 'reverser engineering' in the form of pasting the text from the file. It worked and we started building up a library of presets that eventually became inside-lightroom.com run by Richard Earney. This was long before Matt started creating weekly presets.
I personally have loads up there. That said I also have a lot more unpublished ones. Would I like to get paid for 'special' ones that took a lot of work? Of course, but because a preset is simply a text file, it's hard to hide what's in there. It's just numbers after all.
If there were a method of obfusication I'd prefer it anyhow, whether presets are free of not. Besides, even if they were you could do a before and after and copy the settings...
Sean
Why would prefer a method of obfusication? LR is supposed to be easy to use. Why would you want to complicate an already easy to use part of it? Anyone can create a preset without needing training in some programming language. Knowing you can do it yourself makes it easier to decide the value of buying it from someone else.