http://www.640pixels.com/articles/free-adobe-lightroom-presets.aspx - 3 Good B&W plus 4 split tones for each…

http://digitalfreak.net/2008/12/22/lightroom-600-free-presets-to-download/ - over 600 presets – never be stuck again… you’ll no doubt find a large portion of these to be not your taste, but you can remove what you don’t need !

http://inside-lightroom.com/ - another compilation

http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/archives/presets/ - and another

Lightroom

Found my first major annoyance with Lightroom / Adobe Camera Raw.

If I shoot raw ( .nef ) with my D60, it incorporates all the settings from the camera, such as saturation, sharpness etc, which it would apply if you are shooting JPEG or RAW+JPEG ( it also uses them to create the embedded jpeg preview ).

When I use CaptureNX to convert my images, it can interpret these values, and applies them, giving me the same vivid colors, etc as I would acheive shooting JPEG, but also allowing me to modify the values if I need to, such as white balance, etc… the beauty of RAW

When, however, I dump the images into Lightroom, ACR reads them in a generic form, and does not process them via the same routines as CaptureNX ( which, effectively is how the camera does it as well ), and results in a really flat, blasé, image.

Obviously there is a workaround, of doing the conversion in CaptureNX and importing the result into Lightroom. This leaves me no further forward, I use lightroom to organise everything, and I keep the images in .nef format, exporting them when I need them after modification. If I start keeping the JPEGs in Lightroom, I either sacrifice space by keeping the NEF’s seperate, or I sacrafice them, and hope the JPEG is good enough.

I think I’m going to have to try and find a happy medium, and get some form of preset defined that can mimic the output of CaptureNX ?

At the end of the day, it’s not make or break for me using Lightroom, it’s an awesome app, CaptureNX really is TOO slow to use seriously, and it’s always there if I need it, but it would be nice, that when Adobe decide that camera x, y and z are supported in Lightroom, the raw files are actually supported fully, and not just that it can read the basics from the file, to add to the stats of how many cameras ACR supports…