In the Basics sub-set, you’ll find everything that isn’t strictly related to an “effect.” Stuff for getting your images looking polished and natural.
–Start Over–
Resets everything to the Adobe defaults. Just like hitting that “Reset” button in the Develop Module.
A Beginning…
This family of presets provides a good starting point for getting your images corrected for exposure and white balance. All three automatically adjust white balance and exposure. The Normal and Strong versions also add a bit of “snap” to the images by increasing contrast and clarity. The Lite version sets the contrast and clarity settings to Adobe’s defaults.
If the image has a strong backlight, the auto-exposure algorithm in Lightroom will get fooled and tend to reduce exposure, when you probably want the opposite. In fact, it’s probably more likely to be fooled than your camera’s meter is, since auto-exposure tends to give priority to the highlights (generally a good thing). Lightroom’s Auto-White Balance algorithm gets fooled by just about anything blown-out as well. If your image has blown-out areas, this isn’t your preset, and if you have something that looks good out of camera, you should probably skip this one.
Image Courtesy Fer Juaristi - www.ferjuaristi.com
The “Auto” Group of Presets
We’ve included presets that automatically set Brightness, Contrast, Exposure, Blacks, Tone, and White Balance, all independent of one another. It may seem redundant, since there’s an “Auto” button for tone and white balance available in the Develop Module. However, Lightroom’s Auto-Tone messes with ALL the sliders in the Tone section. It changes exposure, recovery, fill light, blacks, brightness, AND contrast, all simultaneously. Typically it does a crappy job with it, too, in my opinion. So we’ve given you presets that automatically set any one of those sliders individually. Auto | Exposure is nice because it allows you to just ballpark the exposure with a single click, without having Lightroom screw with the brightness and contrast and such. Auto | Shadows / Blacks is a great help when you have a low-contrast image due to flat light or flare. They’re basic, but extremely useful for quick, fundamental tweaks, and they’re a novel hack of Lightroom’s preset structure that isn’t directly available in Lightroom’s main interface.
Brightside
Packages together automatic shadow clipping and an overall boost to the midtones and highlights in an image, appropriate for shots that are heavily backlit. This is also a good preset for a lot of subjects because it has a nice “light” tone curve. If you liked Claire-ify from TRA2 – The Revenge, then you’ll like this. It can change the mood of a photo, and plays nicely with a lot of the other presets (try running one of the effects presets first, then this, for instance). You might just like it so much that you apply it to everything.
Image Courtesy Chenin Boutwell - www.boutwellstudio.com
Electric Skies
This preset creates deeper, richer skies – much like a polarizing filter. It won’t make a sky blue where it’s overcast, but it will make blue skies bluer, and clouds more pronounced. It will also affect anything blue in an image, including reflections of the sky, clothing, and even eyes. Keep watch over other areas of the photo that might be inadvertently affected.
Image Courtesy Doug Boutwell - www.dougboutwell.com
Highlight Hero
Simply sets the highlight recovery slider to 100, 66, or 33. Included as a preset to keep you from having to move your mouse all the way across the screen to fiddle with the slider. Brings detail back to lost highlights without affecting the rest of the tonal scale.
Image Courtesy Amelia Lyon - www.amelialyon.com
Landscape
Boosts saturation, contrast, and clarity, particularly in the blues and greens, along with a lot of highlight recovery (for those tricky, extreme contrast situations). A good starting point for traditional landscape images that need a boost.
Image Courtesy Doug Boutwell - www.dougboutwell.com
Phil’s Shadows
Get it? Adds fill light to shadows by increasing the fill light slider, and sets the shadows to 0 to avoid clipping. If you have blocked up shadows, or just want to lift them a bit, try this preset.
Image Courtesy Doug Boutwell - www.dougboutwell.com
Sharpening Presets
There are four sharpening presets, listed in order of their relative strength. As a caveat, let me say that I think Lightroom 2′s sharpening algorithms suck. A lot. If you’re making a print big enough for it to matter, sharpen in Photoshop. The results are SO much better.
That said – Sharp Cheddar is relatively mild (ironically), and Sharpedo (a cross between a shark and a torpedo) will likely be your best bet for everyday images. This s***’s out of focus is a very strong sharpening setting appropriate for when you basically s*** the bed on your focus and want to add some detail back (again, Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen would be better for this). This s***’s out of focus AND noisy is for when you s*** the bed on your focus while shooting in the dark, and sharpening would increase grain and noise to objectionable levels. It’ll add some detail while minimizing added noise. If you have a 100% Lightroom-based workflow, these four should have you covered, but again, for critical work, sharpen in Photoshop.
Smack My Pix Up
Adds some contrast, clarity, and saturation to images. It’s the rough equivalent of “Oh, Snap!” from The Original Totally Rad Action Mix, at least in intention. If you don’t need to tweak exposure and white balance, then this is a good replacement for A Beginning…, which would otherwise have a chance of screwing up something that’s already spot-on (and good for you, with your disciplined shooting habits! 
Image Courtesy Chenin Boutwell - www.boutwellstudio.com
