Presets can be great for creating a certain effect or look for your image, but sometimes you wish the effect just wasn’t so strong. Sure, you can go into the Develop Module panels and adjust various sliders to try to soften or fade the effect. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t work so well, especially if the preset involves split toning and curve adjustments. So in this tutorial I’ll show you another way you can fade or reduce the opacity of the preset. It involves a trip to Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, and back to Lightroom Classic. You can do all of this from within Lightroom and it only involves a couple of rather easy steps. Watch this video and I’ll show you how easy it is to fade your preset.
Reducing the Opacity of a Preset Using Lightroom Classic and Photoshop
3 thoughts on “How to Reduce or Fade a Lightroom Preset”
Hi Valerie, silly question but is it ok that it is saved as a psd? If your work is done in LR and you want to save it all together, does the extension change? If not can you change it back to a Jpeg?
Thanks,
Hi Nora, It’s perfectly ok that it’s saved as a PSD. When you export the PSD (exporting LR’s way of “saving”) you can export it as a JPEG or a TIFF. You will still have the PSD file available, it won’t be touched.
If you prefer, you can change your Lightroom preferences to have photos brought into Photoshop saved as TIFF files instead. To do that, in Lightroom click on top menu Edit >Preferences > External Editing and change PSD to TIFF on the little dropdown menu. PSD or TIFF either one is fine because you will be exporting a JPEG most likely, for printing or sharing.
Valerie