Presets May Be Killing Your Creativity

Presets. Those easily usable constructed looks that are so popular for use on social (anti-social?) sharing sites. Tons are available from free to egomania inspired prices. Advocated by their creators, tone deaf instructors and other cretins, all in the aim of taking your creativity out to the cornfield and murdering it.

Do I sound rather annoyed?

I am indeed. Far too often I see very talented creatives, primarily photographers, but also videographers who live to use someone else’s LUT, suborning their own creativity by running it over with the steamroller of someone else’s choices.

Now if your goal is to have your work look like someone else’s work, move along, there is nothing for you to see here. However if you envision yourself as even marginally creative and capable of independent thought, this article is for you.

The Preset Concept

Let’s suppose that you are doing a photographic project where you want to apply some consistent editing settings either as your process or as a starting point. The idea of the preset is that you would do your work on one of your images, and then using the functionality of your editing tool, save those adjustments as a personal preset. A preset could even be as simple as applying your copyright information to all your images, with no actual changes to the content, only to the metadata.

Perhaps you are doing a project involving pet photography. You do your first edits to deal with lighting, highlights, shadows, colour adjustments and perhaps a contrast curve. You want to do the same thing for all the images or some of the images in the project. You make your edits and save them as a preset.

It’s a really brilliant and simple tool.

Where Presets Get Out of Hand

If you are already editing, you know that a set of image adjustments is rarely generic. You may perhaps have a preset that you create that defines a particular colour temperature, or a generic level of sharpening, or applies a very subtle vignette. These are your choices and apply to your work, but they may not actually work in every photographic or video application.

However, many creatives care more about what others think than trusting their own minds and want their work to look like the work of others, and erroneously believe that an external preset will do this for them. The problem is that a preset that works for one image or clip in a project may not be applicable to other images or clips in a project and certainly not generically for all images or all clips. This is a recipe for failure.

Moreover, the user cannot always tell what the preset is actually doing, so the illusion that we can learn to make our own presets by playing with the presets of others only applies when we can see the individual actions in a preset. Those who sell presets do not want you to be able to copy their work, which is fair, so you do not get to see the actual steps at all. Instead you just get a can of virtual spray paint that does the same thing every time. This does nothing to enhance your creativity, nothing to make your work stand out, and nothing to define your vision to viewers.

Build Your Own

I am not proposing that presets are useless. You as the creative may define a set of looks for particular subject matter, and if you make images or videos of the same kind of subjects regularly, it would be convenient to have all those actions contained in a simple, yet alterable single action. For example, I have a LUT that I created that I can use to create the look of a night video shoot. It provides a consistent look for multiple clips without individual edits in a single project. It might even be a starting point for a different project, but that is rarely so. I have a preset for headshots of people with very pale skin but very dark hair that contains the steps that I would typically always do for these subjects. The preset however is dependent on consistency of position relative to the subject, lighting type, lighting placement and control of background. This preset does not work for subjects with darker skin or even for pale skinned subjects with very light toned hair. Any preset worth its effort has some level of specificity and also is YOUR construction, meaning it adds your unique value proposition.

Summary

Van Gogh, Picasso, Caravaggio and Rembrandt all have a recognizable style and look. This look is a part of how they tell their stories. You can purchase presets that will apply these looks to your own work, but all they show is a lack of creativity on the part of the artist who is trying to look like the achievements of someone else. I call such people looters. They try to create benefit for themselves by stealing from others. Certainly one can and should look for ideas from other creatives, but copying them is not creative, it is the action of a Xerox machine. So, if you will use presets, make your own and stop wasting time and money trying to make your work look like someone else’s work. Unless of course you want to be a looter.

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