From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Working with profiles and presets - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Working with profiles and presets

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- [Instructor] Two of the most fun and powerful features in Camera Raw are the use of Profiles and Presets. I'm going to select the farm, as well as the portrait and the waterfall image, and then click on the Open in Camera Raw icon to open all three of these files. We'll start with the waterfall image, and I want to start by talking about Profiles. So Profiles, we can think of them as setting the base interpretation of the image. So every raw file must have a profile, and you can only have one profile applied to an image at a time. You can change the profile at any time, but when you select another profile, it's going to remove the one that was previously applied. When working with raw files, Adobe's default profile is Adobe Color for color images and Adobe Monochrome for black and white images. Now, if you're working with JPEG files, a profile is actually applied when the image was captured, and created, and saved. So the profile that will show up here will just be called Color or Monochrome, but it won't say Adobe because it isn't a raw profile. All right, we can select from this default list or we can click here to browse additional profiles. So here, we have the additional Adobe Raw Profiles. We've got the Color profile, which, like I mentioned, it's the default and it's a great starting point for any image. Monochrome, great starting point if you want to convert to black and white. For Adobe Landscape, this profile adds saturation to all of the colors in the image, and it enhances especially the blues and the greens. While the profile adds a slight amount of contrast in the mid tones, it also helps maintain details in high dynamic range scenes, so where there's a lot of contrast, by slightly compressing the highlights and the shadow values in the image. Now, Adobe Neutral is going to reduce saturation, as well as contrast, and it renders quite a flat, low-contrast version of your image. But it can be very handy if you've gone out photographing on a very high-contrast sunny day because it can help flatten out so that you still can maintain detail in your shadows and highlights. Then, we have Adobe Portrait. It's designed for portrait images. It has a slightly more gentle tone curve so there's less contrast. And it can help render better skin tones. And then Adobe Vivid is kind of the opposite of Adobe Neutral, so it adds a lot of vibrance, a lot of contrast, and it's designed to make landscape images more dynamic, but it still renders natural skin tones. Then, I have another profile here, Adobe Standard. You may or may not see that profile. It's one of the older profiles from previous versions. So for this image, Adobe Landscape is my preferred profile, but if I were to switch over to the portrait image, if we look at Landscape, well, we can see that it makes me look like I have a sunburn. The Neutral's a bit too flat, but the Portrait really renders those skin tones well. Adobe Vivid, I think it's adding a little bit too much contrast to the overall image. So my favorite or my preferred profile would probably be either Adobe Portrait or we could try Monochrome. All right, let's return to the waterfall image. So under the Adobe Raw Profiles is another category of Raw Profiles called Camera Matching, and these are designed to match the presets that the camera manufacturer offers with the camera setting menus on the actual back of your camera. So if you've gone to the back of your camera and you've chosen something like Faithful, or Landscape, or Portrait, or Neutral and you want Camera Raw to try to match what the image looked like on the camera to what it looks like here in Camera Raw, these would be the profiles that you would choose from. But you may see a different list depending on your camera. All right, below that, we have a number of different creative profiles, and the great thing about these is they can be applied to any image. So not just your raw images, but also your JPEG images. And as soon as we click to apply one of these, we'll get an amount slider where we can either decrease or increase the amount of change that we're getting by applying that profile. And if you like one of these profiles, you can click on the star icon in order to add them to your favorites. So be sure to check out also the Black and White, the Modern, and the Vintage profiles. All right, let's move to the farm image, and we're going to talk a little bit about Presets. So Presets can contain a profile, but they can also keep track of all of the different settings that you make in, for example, the Light, or Color, or Effects panel. So they can change the profile but also more. And of course, whatever they change, that's always re-editable. So under the Presets, there are some presets that make very small changes like under the defaults. So here, this would just change the profile and add lens correction, or change the profile, add lens correction and noise reduction. So you can just hover your cursor over these and go through them. But as you can see, they're very minimal in the changes that they make. Whereas if I scroll up and we take a look at some of these premium presets, they can give the image an entirely different look and feel. For example, under Cinematic, when I position my cursor and we can see that preview, we're making a lot of changes to this image. All right, I like this one, so I'm going to select it. Again, I get an amount slider so I can decrease or increase the amount of change or effect that the preset has on the image. And Presets are a great way to learn how to achieve a certain look because after you apply the preset, you can return to the edit stack and take a look at which panels have been changed. So we can toggle the eye icon next to the curve or to the color mixer, and then we could use the disclosure triangle and actually see what changes were made. And we can even make changes to those changes. So if we want to adjust this to our own personal taste, we can do so. You can always use Command + Z or undo the application of a preset or the last thing that you've done. And you can use the three dots if you ever need to reset the image to either when you opened it or to its default settings. I'll go ahead and click Done to return to bridge. And I think the best part about applying both Profiles, as well as Presets, is that there's no right or wrong. It just depends on how you want your image to look. And because they're all non-destructive, you can always refine or remove any of the settings at any time.

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