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Friday, April 04, 2008

lightroom presets for the Pentax K200D

Since Adobe yanked back their support for the K200D (I assume it'll be back soon...and work right), I've been playing around with development settings in Lr, trying to get a presetting which makes my raw (dng) files from my Pentax K200D look more like the out of camera jpegs (rather than a bit washed out or... hmmm, hard to describe how they looked I'll post some examples below). Without this my photos need a lot of individual attention to look properly toned and saturated. I'm pretty happy with these settings, they're not quite a perfect match for the camera's jpeg settings, the but much better than nothing (for my taste). In addition to the camera calibration settings, I've turned up the "clarity" slider, and a touch of vibrance and saturation.

I've developed these for outdoor/daylight shots, but they seem to be work as a good starting point for indoor shots around my house, after a white balance adjustment.

If you want to try these settings you can download the file here and unzip it. You'll need to move it to the user presets folder which on a mac is at (your home directory)/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets/User Presets (and i think would be somewhere within the application data folder on windows), and then restart Lightroom.

Here's a sample (click thumbnail for 640x428 version). The only processing (other than application of the preset) done here was exporting from lightroom as small jpegs.
as imported: vs. w/ preset applied:

this one was cropped somewhat then exported as above...
as imported: vs. w/ preset applied:

There you go. You should of course develop your own, but this might provide you with a starting point. If you want to share your settings with the world let me know and I'll post 'em here (I can host the files too if you need).

later...josh

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

it's up!

hey! just lettin' you know that my new photo gallery is up and basically fully operational (not many photos on it yet...soon). it's at http://fstop.110mb.com/ but i'll make a permanent link somewhere at the top of this page for those of you who don't change your bookmarks.

all my best shots old and new will be available there. this site will be updated less frequently if at all... it may become more of a real blog. we'll see.

as you peruse my new site, i'd appreciate hearing about any bugs or errors you find. there's a contact link that'll tell you how to email me. thanks.

btw - I signed that site up for the amazon affiliate program so if you're planning on shopping for something on amazon.com, you can search for it from my site, and a small percentage of your purchase price will go to helping me support my photography addiction. more info at the site. don't worry, the adds are on a dedicated ad page, not strewn around the gallery.