You’ve seen those old pictures, with the hippies dancing in the field and the sun shining behind them and the age of the photo creates these neato pink/orange/yellow colors? You probably have a few old family prints that have a similar effect. Ah, the good old days…
Anyway, I wanted to create this warm, 70s-style flared effect in some of my images the other day. Being too lazy to export from Lightroom to Photoshop all the time, I was determined to create the effect in Lightroom. Here is what I came up with:
 70s Flare Preset - Before |
 70s Flare Preset - After |
Ok, so it’s not a “lens flare” as far as those cute little circles caused by your lens aperture are concerned. So sue me. But you know what? Using this preset with an image I had that did contain such a lens flare looked awesome! But you don’t need it, as long as you have some directional light such as the sun or maybe even a strobe to make the effect more believable.
When you use this preset, you will want to drop the temperature (in the Develop module’s white balance settings) down about 1500 points from your original image or your result will be way too warm. I try not to save white balance settings in my presets because they vary so much, and it’s not very often that one of my presets relies on a drastic white balance shift like this one does.
There are also two graduated filters with this preset, and you may want to rotate and reposition them according to your liking. As long as they are opposite each other as originally in the preset you’ll be fine.
Well, there you have it. Download it and enjoy. I’d love to hear what you think of it, and would especially like to see how you’ve used it!
You happened to post this nifty little filter on my B-Day so I felt obliged to dwnload it. peace… Robb
I’d like to use your cool Lightroom preset, but I can’t seem to figure out how to open the file in lightroom. Can you walk me through it? I’ve never uploaded anything into lightroom before (besides images).
Thanks!
Absolutely! First, you must unzip it with whatever program you are comfortable with. From there are two ways to add it to Lightroom. The easiest way is to go to your Develop Module and right-click the User Presets and select Import… from the sub-menu. Then navigate to the preset file you just unzipped and click the OK button. Voila!
You can also copy it manually to your Lightroom Presets folder. The easiest way to find it is to use Lightroom itself: From Lightroom’s main menu, click Edit -> Preferences… (or use Ctrl+, or the equivalent Mac key combo). When the Preferences dialog appears, navigate to the Presets tab. Near the center is a section labeled Location that contains a button that reads “Show Lightroom Presets Folder…” which will open the file folder containing the Lightroom presets folder. Mine (Windows 7) is in the C:UsersValued CustomerAppDataRoamingAdobe folder. Open the Lightroom folder here and you will see a list of various Presets folders. The one you need is the Develop Presets folder. Open this and the User Presets folder inside it and you should recognize the names from your user presets already in lightroom. Then just move your new preset into this folder and restart Lightroom.