Monday, June 08, 2009

CoffeeShop B&W PSE Presets Correction and a New Nephew!

First, I am an aunt once again! My little sis had Little D, a beautiful little boy, Saturday evening. He joins his little sis Princess and the family is doing great. I am looking forward to taking some newborn shots in the next weeks. I love being an aunt, it is just as great as being a grandparent without having to be old and cranky. ;-)


Second, some PSE preset information. For those of you who download the PSE CoffeeShop B&W Presets (dng) files, you probably noticed they were huge and not something you would want to store on your hard drive (yes, I am an idiot). Well, I think I have corrected that and the new download links are posted here. Now the zipped file is 2 mg versus 28 mg. The original ones work fine, but if you want to save space on your computer, please download the newer versions. And LR and Photoshop users, you don't have to worry about this, it only effects PSE users.

A few notes on using Presets in PSE ACR. If you open a .jpg as a RAW file this set of presets will probably blow out your highlights and you will have to adjust the exposure and recovery sliders. I wrote these presets to work on RAWs, which have low contrast.

You can not batch process jpgs in ACR, but you can batch process RAWs, so if you want to quickly turn a few images B&W with these presets, drag them in the same folder, shift-click or ctrl-click on the images you wish to adjust, and they will all open in ACR. Then select them all and apply the preset.

All of this might sound like a lot of work, but the beauty of using CoffeeShop Presets on RAW files is that often you won't have to make many additional adjustments at all (unless your RAW is really screwed up). For example, say you have a lovely RAW of your cat you want to turn into a vanilla B&W. If you use actions you first open the RAW in ACR and you adjust white balance, exposure, and all of the settings you usually tweak. Then you open the image in PSE and run an action. If you use the preset, you apply the preset to your RAW in ACR and do minor tweaking, click "open image" and you are done! It is so much faster.

Just drag your favorite CoffeeShop Preset dng files in a folder on your desktop to make it easy for yourself! If you want to learn how to install CoffeeShop Presets in your program, read my tutorial. And if you have any questions, please post them at the CoffeeShop Flickr Group!

5 comments:

  1. Congratulations on the new nephew. Lucky you, newborn photos coming up. I'm inclined to agree...nephews and nieces are very exciting.

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  2. congratulations!
    cool blog!
    wow you have allot of followers :) well done

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  3. Wow, I've just found your blog and have enjoyed looking at all the fabulous stuff you can do. So, I've now got myself PSE 6, downloaded an action( the gorgeous coffee b & w ones). I'm determined that photo editing and I are going to learn new stuff!. Lots to inspire here.

    congrats on the new little nephew!

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  4. Hoping you can help. The last 4 PSE actions you have done for some reason are not showing in my PSE 6 editor. I have most of the other PSE actions and have never had any problem with them. When I go into the photocreations folder they are right where they should be but then they are not showing up in Editor for me to use. Any ideas?

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Rita