LRB Graduated Filter Presets for Lightroom 2

While I provide a lot of free tips, tutorials, and even galleries to users, sometimes I do a little that requires some return on my time.
To aid users in selecting the right look for their landscape images, I've created a set of over 100 Graduated Filter presets to get you started with making creative choices for your images. Covering both landscape and portrait orienations, as well as hard and soft line filters, these filters come in 3 standard colours: ND (Grey), Blue and Tobacco. As is also standard, they come in strengths of 1 stop (0.3), 2 stops (0.6) and 3 stops (0.9). It was a bit of work to create this, but I'm not charging a whole lot for them, just €5.00 (about $7.75). Obviously you can tweak the settings once applied. In fact I positively encourage it!

Why should you pay for these, when you could create them yourself? Well the fact that it takes a bunch of time to put them together is the best reason. Probably more than €5 of your time. Also by running down through the Presets panel on the left of Develop, you can preview them quickly to see how they look with your image. Much quicker than mucking around with sliders.

You can see some of the presets in sample form here: Download Sample Grads

To install these presets, drop the Sample Grads folder into:

User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets on OS X,
C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets on XP-Note that Application Data is a hidden folder,
C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Develop Presets on Vista,
where User is your login name.
Or you can click on Preferences>Presets>Show Lightroom Presets Folders to open this folder in Finder/Explorer. Then open the Develop Presets folder from there.

The full version folder contains 6 Sub folders, place these folders in the Develop Preset location mentioned above.
You can also Right click on a preset or folder and import them from within Develop, which is fine for a small amount of presets, but for folders, manually placing them and restarting Lightroom is quicker.

The 6 folders are:
Grads: Hard-Landscape
Grads: Hard-Portrait
Grads: Hard-Portrait 2
Grads: Soft-Landscape
Grads: Soft-Portrait
Grads: Soft-Portrait 2
Hard Grads have a tight transition, which Soft Grads user a wider transition. Landscape and Portrait Grads need to be separate as they don't rotate. The 3 colours (ND, Blue and Tobacco) come in 1, 2, and 3 stops varieties, equivalent to 0.3, 0.6 and 0.9 in standard filter terminology. Also as most Landscape photographers use the Rule of Thirds to compose, each type is set on the bottom and top third, allowing you to choose the nearest one quickly. To change the filter, click on the pin to select it (Press M to activate Grad Filter in Develop, if it's not open). Drag the pin to move the centre of the grad, and the outside lines to make it softer or harder. Finally click the colour chip to change the tint. The Blue and Tobacco colours I've chosen are simply ones I like. You may prefer a redder Tobacco, or different blue. Actually then ones I have look similar to the Cokin set I own, so I was trying to get close to them.




To Download, add them to the cart. Payment is Paypal via E-junkie, but can also take Credit Card. Once Paypal sends notification, an email will be sent with a download code.

A look at the sets:



Here's roughly how they look, first the hard set, then the soft.

Please note that VAT is charged in the EU

Version 2 Update: Version 2 of the LRB Grads contains an extra folder of Sunset filters, along with a middle filter for each of the types and strengths.
There are 2 zips in the archive: One with the original Colour Strength Position naming, and one with the new form Position Colour Strength.
The new version makes for quicker previewing in the Navigator.
To install the new filters right click on a preset and click Show in Finder/Explorer. If you are updating and want to use the new names, delete the older presets first. Delete the LRB Grads folders (there are 6 in V1).
Unzip the file gradsV2newnames.zip file in this folder for the new names, or gradsV2original.zip for the original naming scheme. Restart Lightroom.