1: Straight from camera image

Normal image of bride straight from camera

2: Base Autotone BW

Sleeklens Base Autotone preset applied to image of a bride

3: Base High Key

Sleeklens High Key preset applied to image of a bride

4: Base Edit 2

Sleeklens Base Edit 2 preset applied to image of a bride

 

5: Kaleidascope

Sleeklens Kaleidascope preset applied to image of a bride

1: Violet Mazes

Sleeklens Violet Mazes preset applied to image of a bride

 

1: Sunset Portrait

Sleeklens sunset preset applied to image of a bride

 

 

Sleeklens Review

I was contacted by Jane Grates of Sleeklens a few months ago to review their “strike a pose portrait” presets. Presets are like filters in mobile phone apps  but they allow photographers much more control over the images as you can either paint various parts of an image or vary the amount of preset applied to give you a more subtle look.
I tend to initially edit in Lightroom and then I move into Photoshop for more refinement. Its funny when I think back to being in my darkroom with bits of tissue paper and lace tied onto the lens of my enlarger and a variety of different toning chemicals to produce interesting effects when printing, now all the magic happens at the touch of a button and there are numerous presets to try.

Sleeklens are a company that I hadn’t used before, so I thought why not give it a go and test them out. They do presets for Lightroom and photoshop workflows,  I happily obliged and ventured into the Lightroom presets offered by Sleeklens.

As photographers of today our workflow has increased in volume so much, gone are the days of shooting rolls of film.
We would hand them over to a lab and then forget about them until you had to collect them. Then we would carefully mount them into albums or frames for our clients.

Now Photoshop has replaced the darkroom or lab and you can spend hours transforming images sitting at your computer instead of being in the dark!,  and the whole album process when designing pages can be done sitting at our screens.

The great thing about presets is that it saves us valuable time, instead of spending hours of screen time, creating a particular look it can all be achieved in the click of a button. Thats what I like about presets, the art is to use them sparingly and creatively so you don’t get an over processed look, or depending on what your doing to you desire to go for certain looks. Whatever you like to do it does save lots of time.

Starting with a straight from camera shot of one of my brides, I applied 6 different presets, each one creates a very different look and mood.
On some of the images you can see that the hightlights are blown, you would just have to pull back the highlights in lightroom to remove this.

You can see for yourself what Sleeklens can do for you and if you are interested to try them out please follow the links below:

https://sleeklens.com/product/strike-a-pose-portrait-workflow/
https://sleeklens.com/product-category/lightroom-presets/

Thank you Jane for letting me have a play!