As we have already commented on some occasion, if you want to stand out on Instagram you must take care of the image of your publications and be creative to differentiate yourself from other users. We can do this in many ways but, one of them, always maintain the same aesthetic so that they can recognize your photos. And you can easily achieve this by creating and applying your own presets in all your posts.
What are presets?
These items are known by many names: presets, luts, presets, filters, etc. But in the end they all apply a series of adjustments to your photos so that they look a certain way.
Some can completely change the appearance of the photo, others limit themselves to highlighting a specific color or, for example, they can leave only a “visible” color to highlight it. The combination of functions that a preset can perform is equivalent to the number of photo editing styles that exist. A very clear example of this can be the well-known “Orange & Teal” style , which takes all the warm tones to orange and all the cold tones to turquoise.
These luts are made by varying the different parameters of the image such as exposure, contrast, clarity or the HSL control of each color separately.
There are many applications from which we can apply these types of settings on our phone. Some are wildly popular like: VSCO, Snapseed, Afterlight and a long etcetera . But, without a doubt, the best known is Lightroom .
Lightroom is a suite application for Adobe professionals that allows us, among other things, to create and apply this type of “filters”. So, now that you know what they are, let’s see how we can make them in Lightroom using its free version.
Create your own presets for Instagram
The process is quite simple and, the best thing is that you can create them both from the desktop version for PC of this program and from its mobile version.
If you do the process from the phone :
- Choose the photo you want to edit and import it into Lightroom. This can be done both from the smartphone gallery itself and from the menu of this app on the photo icon with a “+”.
- Once the photo is imported into the Adobe app, you will have to make the adjustments you want in it. Here, let your creativity run wild to do something curious and attention-grabbing.
- When the photo is the way you want it, it’s time to save your preset in Lightroom. To do this, click on the three-point menu on the top bar and select “Create preset”.
- In this menu choose those fields that you have modified and you want that when applying this lut in another photograph it is visible. You can also add a name to better identify it and, of course, add it to your own group.
And your first filter for your Instagram photos would already be created. Now, to apply it to any capture it is even simpler:
- Add a new photo to the Lightroom catalog and open it in the editor.
- Scroll through the menus in the bottom bar until you reach the “Preset” option. Enter it.
- Here you will see all the settings that you have saved within your collection. To apply it is as simple as clicking on one of them and confirming the changes. Ready.
On the other hand, if you want to carry out all this process from your computer, you will only have to get to the point of having that first photograph edited within the program. After that, you just have to click on the “+” that accompanies the preset option on the left sidebar and select the settings to save. Ready again.
How to download free presets for Lightroom
Being such a well-known and widely used application, there are many users who create their filters and upload them to the internet for free so that others can download them. Although, of course, there are also other users who market their luts.
There is an incredibly large list of results if you search the internet. Both on websites, forums and YouTube videos, there are many professionals and non-professionals who provide their own filters. Some interesting websites that you can consult are: Crehana, Adobe Exchange or Preset Love among many others.
The important thing here is that you identify whether it is luts for Lightroom Classic (desktop version) or Lightroom Mobile (for the phone). While the first consists of a file with an .xml extension, which you can load from the same preset import menu, the mobile version will have a .dng extension, which you must import into your gallery as a normal photo and then save the setting. preset as we have taught you.
This is everything you need to know about presets to stand out on Instagram. Now is the time to unleash your creativity and create spectacular settings that will catch the eye of everyone who sees your photos online.
