Avoiding Image Halos

Of all image imperfections my personal pet hate has got to be the ‘halo’. Halos are bands of light (or dark) that follow edges in an image. They are most prominent along high contrast edges such as when the land meets the sky. As with other anomalies, halos are to me like signposts that say the artist hasn’t paid enough attention to detail. It’s quite often in the details that a great piece of work is elevated over the mundane. Of course our goal isn’t merely to create technically correct photographs, but such imperfections should be calculated creative decisions rather than demonstrating a lack of care or craft. Anything that doesn’t seem ‘quite right’ in an image gives the viewer a chance to escape and question the making of it rather than enjoying and absorbing it.

I feel that part of my goal is to shut the door to the outside world and let the viewer enjoy the world which I have created for them. Note that I say ‘created for them’; the image doesn’t have to be realistic or accurate. Rather I feel it has to have believability within one’s imagination. Technical mistakes break that illusion and cause mistrust.

Halos are caused by many different things and take on slightly different forms depending on the cause. There are five types I’ll talk about in this post:

1. Chromatic aberration
2. Sharpening
3. Excessive Clarity
4. Spillover
5. Luminance Changes

The first two are pretty easy to deal with.

Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic Aberration is caused by a lens failing to focus all of the different colours onto the sensor at the same point. This results in a ‘fringe’ running along particularly high contrast edges which is usually red or cyan. It is most prominent when using poorer quality lenses but even top of the range lenses exhibit the problem to some degree.

When an image is sized for the web you can sometimes get away with some CA. However I find those that escape attention online reveal themselves in print with a strange coloured ‘glow’ along the edge. The good news is that these are super easy to fix. In Lightroom (or Adobe Camera Raw), go into the Develop Module and look for the Lens Corrections panel on the right hand side. On the Basic tab is an option for ‘Remove Chromatic Aberration’. Ticking this will totally remove the problem ninety nine times out of a hundred

Sharpening

Sharpening basically increases the contrast of edges at a micro level, darkening the pixels on one side and lightening the pixels on the other side. As you apply more sharpening (using the Amount slider in LR) then the degree of darkening/lightening applied to the edge increases. In LR the Radius setting determines how many pixels from an edge should be affected by the sharpening.

Halos appear when the Amount is very high causing the edge pixels to be over-lightened, causing a bright glow along the edge. If using a high Radius setting the width and so the prominence of this glowing halo will increase. It’s worth noting that there is a corresponding dark halo along the darker side of the edge but this tends to be less obvious.

The solution is an easy one; reduce the Amount and/or Radius sliders until the halos disappear (best viewed zoomed in at 1:1). Although different images react differently to sharpening, the Amount slider is usually the chief culprit so it’s worth exercising caution once you get to 60 or so. The default Radius value of 1.0 is reasonable and most people don’t tend to play with it so it’s less of an issue. If you find you have an issue try dropping it down to around 0.7 and seeing if that improves things.

Excessive Clarity

The third type of halo is to me much more obvious when looking at an image. It may have a proper name, but I’m just going to call it an ‘edge contrast halo’ as it is chiefly contrast changes along an edge that cause the problem. This may sound similar to what I just talked about regarding sharpening, and that’s because approach is very similar but with a much wider effect. Indeed over sharpening could be considered an ‘edge contrast halo’ just with a relatively small radius.

Where the previous halos may be restricted to a few pixels either side of an edge, these edge contrast halos are much wider, taking in tens of pixels. The main source of these types of halos is use of the Clarity slider in Lightroom/ACR. Clarity is a contrast enhancement that’s localised along edges - hence it’s called a local contrast enhancement. I often think of Clarity as being like sharpness that you can see at the big picture level without zooming in. The adjustment will increase the contrast of edges to give the illusion of greater detail and sharpness and is much more obvious. This can be a good thing as our eye is more strongly drawn to areas of greater detail. Judicious use of Clarity can help to push and pull the eye to areas of the image we want the viewer to dwell on.

As with sharpening it’s when Clarity is used with too high a value that the dreaded halos appear. They tend to be less glowy than other halos but cover a wider area. To understand what’s going on, let’s look at how you would create a similar effect to Clarity within Photoshop. To perform a local contrast enhancement in Photoshop you use Unsharp Mask, the same tool - paradoxically! - that’s often used to sharpen an image in PS.

As discussed when sharpening we apply a reasonable Amount of sharpening in a small radius (0.7-1.0) to increase perceived sharpness at the pixel level. When performing a local contrast enhancement using the Unsharp Mask however, you use a low amount (5-20%) with a wide radius (30-100 pixels) - the total opposite of what we do with sharpening. This means the adjustment increases contrast over a wider area along the edge albeit with a less pronounced effect.

As with over sharpening too high a value means one side of an edge becomes much darker and the other much lighter causing halos. The light halos are more obvious but it’s worth checking for dark haloes along the edge of e.g. mountain ridges.

Let me demonstrate with an image from Talisker Bay on the Isle of Skye that was causing me some Clarity-induced halo problems. Here’s a version of the image with a number of adjustments but before applying any Clarity. It’s ok, but the water doesn’t demand the viewers attention in the way that I would like. Rather my eye is drawn to the white water across the middle of frame (not so good) before moving up to the sea stack (which is a good thing). It’s definitely lacking some ‘oomph’.

Knowing that Clarity will really help draw out the beautiful streaks and patterns in the water, here’s a version with a somewhat over the top Clarity+100 adjustment. That’s much better! The local contrast enhancement in the foreground ripples has done a great job of making them a prominent feature, and I feel my eye is now pulled between there and the sea stack and bouncing quite freely between those two objects. The sky also has much better definition.

However now take a look at the top left hand corner. There’s an unnatural bright glow in the sky above the cliff. This is one of the halos I’m talking about. It’s not there in the non-Clarity version, so it’s all Clarity’s fault. Though there are no glowing clouds as the rock face approaches the sea to the left of the sea stack, there’s a very bright edge along the rock face that has that look of over sharpening about it.

I like to think of these halos as my mine canary, warning me that I've pushed my post-processing too far.

There are a few solutions.

The first, quite obviously, is reducing the Clarity slider to a lower level. This is often part 1 of any solution if not always the full solution.

The second solution comes by virtue of how Lightroom works. Rather than making pixel level changes, LR keeps a list of instructions it uses to adjust the image. This means that we can make and stack up several adjustments quite happily. For example if I set a global Clarity adjustment of +100 and then paint with a Clarity -100 adjustment then LR does the maths (100-100=0) and knows not to apply any Clarity in that area. If I wanted some of the adjustment to come through, I could use a brush with Clarity -75 to leave a 25 point Clarity adjustment in the painted area.

So in this image, I can completely remove the halo caused by Clarity +100 by using a brush at -100. The temptation may be to zoom in to 1:1 and apply the negative clarity using a small brush size just along the edge itself. In my experience this give you the opposite problem of a dark halo along the edge, where the negative clarity has removed the halo, but it touches the area above where Clarity is still in full effect. I find it’s usually best applied with a wider and fully feathered brush to give it a nice blend with other areas that aren’t being adjusted.

An alternative - and arguably preferable approach - is to apply at most a very small global Clarity adjustment. Up to 20 points gives a nice lift to an image without introducing too many problems. I can then use an adjustment brush with a positive Clarity adjustment to paint Clarity precisely where I want it - in this case in the ripples and the waves, and the clouds. This also avoids the other undesirable byproducts of the global Clarity adjustment I performed earlier which brought out too much detail in the cliff face and over brightened the white water.

Spillover

While we're talking about adjustment brushes, another common halo comes from heavy handed use of adjustment brushes that I call ‘spillover’. This is where an adjustment is made but not confined within the appropriate area, causing other parts of the image to be incorrectly affected. Most often this might be brightening a mountain ridge, a tree or a rock using a brush with a positive Exposure adjustment. This might brighten the required object, but often results in a patch of sky being wrongly lightened.

There are a few ways to deal with this one. The first is to recognise the warning signal. When editing images in LR I will use the "Before / After” toggle (press ‘/‘), undo/redo or the history panel to get a sense of where I came from. This normally makes particularly heavy handed edits pretty obvious. Alternatively if I take a break and come back to the image later I may see problems I previously missed.

If the spillover is very obvious it normally means the adjustment is being overdone in the first place so I’ll start by toning it down a touch.

In Lightroom you can use the Auto-Mask option for the adjustment brush to limit the brush from going over an edge. In my experience this is a bit hit and miss, with some spillover to similar tones in the background possible and often creating a dappling effect within the object where some tones fall outside of the mask. It can be useful to toggle the Mask Overlay (press O) to see where the adjustment is being applied.

To tackle the actual spillover my preferred approach is to use a decent sized brush with 100% feather and try to paint within the object, not getting too close to the edges. Only the feathered part of the brush should ever fall outside of the object. I then switch to a slightly smaller Erase brush with a lower flow (e.g. 50), still fully feathered, perhaps zoomed in if it’s a tricky edge, and and start erasing the adjustment outside of the object. Ideally I want to remove all of the adjustment from the background, and I use the feathering to reduce it slightly along the edge of the object. I’m not sure why I prefer this ‘apply and erase’ method, but I find it easier than trying to accomplish the same adjustment in one go.

Luminance Changes

Finally for this post Lightroom's Hue-Saturation-Luminance (HSL) panel can also cause you halo problems. The most striking example is where you have an object with a bright blue sky behind. A common adjustment is to lower the luminance of the Blues to darken down the sky to give it more ‘pop’ (sort of mimicking the effect of a polariser). However if you go too far with the adjustment a prominent line will appear along the edge where the edge isn’t quite as distinct as we would like. Even with sharp edges, the edge pixels tend to be a mix of the land and the sky. The luminance reduction only adjusts the purer blues leaving this transition zone behind as a halo (this becomes worse if the edge is slightly out of focus). You may also see this when doing B&W conversions if you drag the luminance of e.g. Blues down in the B&W mix it will turn the sky very dark but can leave a bright halo along the edge. Exercise caution and keep an eye out for these with particularly large luminance changes in the HSL/B&W panel.

Phew!

We’re done. Though lengthy, hopefully the above gives you an idea of things to look out for and suggestions on avoiding them. It’s impossible to cover every eventuality in a post but I think I’ve knocked off the most common culprits. My final trick is to use an adjustment brush with negative Clarity. As well as undoing an overly strong Clarity adjustment it can be very effective in helping soften other halos, bright patches and details that might pull the eye too strongly.

Do you recognise these issues? Are there any problem halos you’ve struggled with that the above solutions don’t help with? I’d be interested to hear about them.

Using Lightroom with a NAS Server

Earlier in the year I bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage) Server and started using it to store my images on.

I've since had a number of people ask me about my set-up so here's a short post about how to use a NAS for Lightroom and your images.

There are lots of NAS models on the market so I'm not able to cover set-up and configuration in this post. The most popular ones have quite a lot of information about them on the internet already. I have a Synology DS413 and the Synology website has good information about setting it up.

How Lightroom Works

You may be aware that a Lightroom catalog is a database that stores the locations of your images and all of the changes that you've made to them in Lightroom.

It doesn't actually store the images within the catalog. Instead when you import images into Lightroom, it puts them somewhere on your computer that you ask it to and then stores the location within the database. When you view an image within Lightroom it goes away to that location to load the file up.

Most of the time Lightroom and the images are on the same computer so it's not something that we care about - though when we run a backup we need to make sure that we include both the catalog location and the image location.

Lightroom Doesn't Like Networks

When it comes to using a NAS the first reality to deal with is that Lightroom doesn't like networks. To be more specific you can't open a Lightroom catalog that's stored on a network. This is due to the way that Lightroom has been designed and its underlying, single-machine technology. To be honest even if you could open it from a network location then the performance would be frustratingly slow anyway.

However the good news is that Lightroom can reference and use images that are stored on the network. So when it comes to a NAS our strategy is to have the Lightroom catalog on our local machine and store the images on the NAS.

Before doing anything please make a fresh backup of your Lightroom catalog and image files in case something goes wrong!

Copying your Images to the NAS

Assuming that you currently have your images on the same machine as your Lightroom catalog, the first thing that we need to do is copy the images to the NAS. On my NAS I created a dedicated 'shared folder' which looks just like any other volume on my Mac. This way I can make sure that all of my images are in one place and without any other junk on the drive.

I always advocate having a single top level folder ('Photos') with a date-based hierarchy of sub-folders underneath. This makes management of image files much easier - backing up, locating and in this case moving images. All I need to do is copy the 'Photos' folder from its current location to the dedicated shared folder on the NAS.

Tell Lightroom to use the NAS Images

Once the image files have been copied over to the NAS we need to tell Lightroom to to look for the images on the NAS instead of their old location. Again having the images under one folder makes life easier - we just tell Lightroom to look in the 'Photos' folder on the NAS rather than on the local drive. To do this follow these steps.

Lightroom will now load images from the NAS, and that's that. The Folders pane in the left hand panel should now list your NAS volume rather than your local hard drive.

It's worth checking that you don't have any missing files at this point to make sure everything has transferred properly (go to the Library menu and then 'Find All Missing Photos').

One thing you must remember to do is update the destination when you next import files otherwise they will be imported to the old location. When in the Import dialog, change the Destination folder to appropriate location on your NAS.

Accessing your Images Over the Internet

One great advantage of storing your images on a NAS is that you can access them over the internet. Obviously this is going to be much slower than on your local network, but it's a workable solution if you need them.

The first thing you need to do is make your NAS visible to the internet. The steps required to perform this vary from NAS to NAS so you'll have to check the manual/internet for your particular model. This is a key feature of all NASs however so should be pretty straightforward. If you have a Synology NAS you can find the instructions here.

Once you've done that you need to connect to your NAS. On my MacBook I go to Finder and then Connect To Server (Cmd+K).

Type in the address of the NAS that you will have created in the previous step and press Connect. All being well a new volume appear in Finder for the NAS, and you can browse and open files over the internet.

To then get Lightroom working with the image files on the NAS, we follow the same steps as above. In Lightroom use ''Update Folder Location' on the top level 'Photos' folder. When the 'Update Folder Location' dialog appears we choose the 'Photos' folder on the NAS volume that we've just connected to.

This will again update Lightroom to use this location when it tries to find any image files.

When you get back home remember to repeat this step to update the folder location to use the local NAS volume rather than the 'NAS via internet' volume.

As a final point though the above works fine and is the simplest way of using a NAS I found the performance disappointing compared to what I was used to with local hard drives. Instead I've implemented a hybrid system whereby I store some images on my internal SSD drive, my image archive on an external RAID drive and then back all of that up to the NAS which then gives me access to my images over wifi or the internet.

It's more complicated and requires some more technical knowledge so it's really not for everyone. I'll write a follow-up post outlining how my set-up works (including the system of backups I use) for anyone that's interested.

Lightroom Workflow: Import

This is the first post in a new series where I share my image processing workflow, which mostly revolves around Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Prior to the release of Lightroom I found organising image files a bit of a nightmare. Now it almost completely removes those difficulties and I highly recommend it.

But to get the most out of it it's important to understand how it works and some of the quirks that makes it different to most other software. The purpose of this series is to give you an insight into how I use Lightroom which will hopefully give you a starting point for your own workflow, or give you another perspective if you are already comfortable with Lightroom.

This short video focuses on importing images from the memory card onto the computer's hard drive and into the Lightroom catalog. I'm not trying to cover every option or possibility with this video for the sake of brevity and clarity. The intention is to show you the key aspects. Some of the main points/highlights:

• Import all images to a single location with a clear structure. This way you know where your images are when you need to find one, or more importanly back them up.
• Apply keywords and metadata, in particular copyright information, on import. As your Lightroom catalog grows it will become increasingly difficult to find images without keywords to search on. Adding several keywords during import helps to keep things organised.
• Use collections to organise your images in Lightroom. Collections are like virtual groups of images, and can include any number of images from any number of physical locations (on your hard drive). Collections help you group images in a way that makes sense to you. Before creating a collection, select the images you want and then check the "include selected images" checkbox when you create the collection.

If you find this video helpful, then please share it. I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions and would be glad to answer any questions  you may have so please leave them in the comments!

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/66601178]

Lightroom Presets (and a Review of Sorts of Skyline Media's)

To me post-processing is an essential part of the image making process. Many bemoan post-processing (summarised as "Photoshopped!") as if the camera takes a true representation of a scene (which it doesn't) and that post-processing is the work of the devil (ignoring the fact that every image in history has been processed in one way or another!).

I'm not really going to argue any further in this post than to say that for our images to really say what we want we need to take control of that post-processing. David duChemin sums it up best for me when he says "there are three images that go into making your final photograph. The first is the image you visualize – the story you are compelled to tell. The second is the scene you capture with the camera. The third is the image you refine in post-production."

Post-processing is something that I really enjoy. That might be the tech geek in me, but I like to see images "finished" and meeting a vision. It's something like drawing a line under the image making process, seeing it through to its ultimate conclusion, and is also a bit more considered and less "snapshotty".

My Initial Experience of Lightroom Presets

I use Adobe Lightroom for most of my post-processing. I think it's a great tool that makes the process of importing, organising, cataloging, processing and outputting images a joy rather than a total nightmare.

It wasn't long after I started using Lightroom (way back in version 1) that I became aware of "presets". Presets are basically a recipe of  processing steps, storing the particular values for any number of the processing controls - from exposure to clarity to chromatic aberration to camera profile - that you can apply to an image without manually dragging sliders and flicking switches. The idea behind them seems to be to recreate a certain look consistently.

I started out with a selection of free presets and started to use them. Once the novelty of various "funky" styles wore off I decided that I'd make my own presets to recreate a certain look from one image to the next. And then sometime later I realised that my images all looked the same. And they all looked odd! Sometimes the preset would suit an image, but e.g. applying my high contrast, high saturation preset to an already high contrast, high saturation image turned the image into a big mess of garish blackness.

For some reason I thought using the preset that made some of my original images look great (hey, relatively!) was "right" and that these less successful nay downright awful images were either right (in a "I guess that's what they should look like" way) or that the captured image was a failure. It took me a long time to realise that different images require different processing, one or two presets should not be applied over and over, and that actually taking control of the post-processing was required to get the best result.

Incredibly obviously but a bit of a penny dropping moment for me was learning to "trust my eyes". If something looks crap, it's probably crap. "Proper photographs" aren't intended to hurt your eyes. People "who appreciate art" (whoever that might be) have the same visual systems to us and so if it looks odd to us it probably looks odd to them too! And so learning the art of post-processing, being a little less one size fits all and heavy handed I think was an important part of my advancement.

I've gone off at a slight tangent. In summary, I felt that presets were a bit, well, rubbish. They didn't really help get a consistent result, and when the result didn't work I'd be scratching my head about how to get what I wanted from that point without just hitting undo or reset. It just seems easier to me to start with a known clean slate and add adjustments rather than apply a bunch of adjustments in a preset and then work out what bits didn't quite work to undo them.

(As a side-note I wonder if presets would work better if the adjustments contained in them were relative rather than absolute. Doesn't really make sense to me for a preset to change the exposure to e.g. +1, when the exposures of a bunch of different images would need adjusting differently. It would seem to make more sense for me to get an evenly exposed image using the regular controls, and then apply a preset to apply the adjustments relative to that point.)

Taking A Second Look - Skyline Media

However I do like to reconsider my thinking from time to time. I'm not always right, and things change so I may be right one day and wrong the next. Just ask my wife!

A blog I follow was recently talking about these awesome presets from Skyline Media and I found a bunch of other reviews on the internet talking them up. Plus, Skyline have a Colin Prior "Signature Series" with quotes from him about how great and very professional and time saving they are. If it's good enough for Colin, it's good enough for me.

Lightroom is on version 4 now, so maybe both it and the presets have evolved to be a bit more useful than my past experience. I'm happy with the style I'm pursuing but I'm always on the look out for further inspiration. So I thought I'd give them a whirl and got their bundle including Essentials Toolbox, Classic Presets, Fun Film Pack and Film X-Process, as well as the Colin Prior Signature Series. Total cost £21.99 with a discount they're running at the moment.

Skyline Essentials Toolbox

The first mistake I made was thinking that the Essentials Toolbox was anything more than other, sometimes free, preset "toolboxes". There are dozens of presets in the Essentials Toolbox pack which sounds great.

But this works in the same way as many of these "toolboxes", they provide a preset that affects one particular slider by a certain amount. So for example you might have 4 presets that gives you +0.5, +1.0, +1.5, +2.0 to exposure, then 4 presets that give you -0.5, -1.0, -1.5, -2.0 to exposure, and then you have another one to set it to 0. 9 presets. Or...you could just drag exposure slider from -2 up to +2 and anywhere along it if you like.

This is touted as a time saver, and maybe for some people it is. My view is that most of the time I don't need precisely +0.5 or +1.0, and so I'm going to end up refining the exposure using the slider anyway. So I think using the preset makes this a longer experience.

When you add in a similar number of presets to adjust contrast, clarity, vibrance, vignettes, etc you have dozens of presets that adjust a particular control by a particular amount. And you have so many presets that you end up scrolling up and down the list looking for the exposure one, and wondering where the vibrance one is, etc. I figure if I'm going to scroll up and down I might as well be sliding the sliders left and right.

I'm not saying they're totally pointless, I think some of them do provide a handy one click alternative. I do like the vignette and lens correction ones as these controls appear at the bottom of the develop controls in Lightroom, so it's quicker to apply a preset than to scroll through the develop controls. Otherwise the presets seem nothing more than a less refined alternative to the standard Lightroom interface - you click on a preset rather than drag a slider. If you like clicking rather than dragging maybe they're great.

But here's something to think about. I could switch on lens correction, then save a preset that only registers the lens correction setting, and have the exact same preset. I can make the preset myself in seconds and have an identical result. Again there are dozens of presets so maybe this would take maybe an hour to do by hand for all of them? £7.99 for an hour's work maybe doesn't seem so bad, or does it? Myself, I'd rather create the few presets that will save some time or inconvenience such as different vignette options, and then use the sliders for the more common develop controls.

The Rest of the Skyline Bundle

The other presets in the bundle - Classic Presets, Fun Film Pack and Film X-Process - don't really have much interest for me (so why did I buy them right?!). They have some funky effects but on the whole don't seem of particularly much use for the landscape photographer.

That has got me wondering if perhaps (penny drop?!) presets are better suited to alternate forms of photography, in particular people photography. There the "starting point" is more uniform (you'd typically want a person's skin tones to be well exposed), you probably have greater volumes to apply the preset to, and maybe the different styles provide a fun twist rather than the totally alien look they give to my landscapes.

Skyline Colin Prior Signature Series

Finally this leads me onto the Colin Prior presets which is what I'm most annoyed. The blurb for these talks about the "Colin Prior look" and applying that style to a multitude of cameras and crops. A key point to note here is that the crop can't be stored in a preset, so the preset name gives you a hint of what the crop should be (I don't massively see the point of that but anyway!).

Ok, so we're left with the Colin Prior "look" across a range of cameras and films. The Skyline Media website says the following:

"This Pack contains over 30 preset variations for both 35mm and MF cameras including the following emulations:

■ Fuji 617 shot with Velvia 50 [3:1]

■ Linhof 617 Technorama with Velvia[3:1]

■ Linhof 612 Technorama [2:1]

■ Hasselblad X-Pan shot with Velvia 50 [3:1]

■ Linhof 612 Technorama [2:1]

■ Phase One MF Digital [4:3]

■ Leica S2 MF Digital [4:3]

■ 35mm Digital [3:2]"

Now if you were to try applying the different presets to one of your images you might not see much in the way of change. And that's because there isn't one.

Looking at the develop settings that are actually applied, from the list above, the only one that has any significant difference from the others is the Leica preset. The only other preset with any variation is the Phase One MF preset which has an imperceptible sharpness boost relative to the others (I guess to emulate a Phase One back you just need to add a wee bit more sharpness!).

All of the other presets are identical in all but name.

The 35mm Digital preset gives an identical result to the Linhof 612 preset, to the Hasselblad preset and to all of the others. Which leaves the crop factor in the presets name as the only differentiator which the user has to apply themselves anyway!

(I should add that the presets come in groups of three for each camera - standard, postive contrast and negative contrast. This is basically the same preset again with either positive or negative shifts on the contrast slider.)

When I realised this (and verified by looking through the details in the preset file) I was less than impressed. The regular price for this is £9.99 for which you get basically one preset plus the Leica one. Labelling this as 30+ presets is incredibly underhand if not false advertising. And then for Colin Prior to put his name to it, well, I just don't understand that.

I put my case to Skyline Media and asked for a refund which to their credit they did without quibbling. Though they took it on trust, I've uninstalled the presets as can be seen in the screenshot above. Apparently I'm their first dissatisfied customer which leaves me with one of two conclusions:

1. I am (was) their only customer
2. There are a bunch of people using these presets without realising or caring (this is even more worrying!)

Normally I don't complain too much when I find something that doesn't work so well, I take it as a life lesson and get on with things. My modus operandi is "live and let live". But in this instance I'm so disappointed with what I see as a misleading product offering little content or value. Frankly I think it's a bit of a ripoff and I felt I would be doing the community a disservice by not sharing what I found and experienced.

Summary

In conclusion, based on my albeit limited research, my original view on presets still holds.

• They can provide some novelty and fun that may be better suited to other forms of photography.
• Rather than provide distinction, they can make your images look a bit samey and indeed pre-canned
• They may provide a starting point, but to me they rob you of the vital creative process of organically evolving your image and understanding the tools and processes required to do that
• They are either awful and free, or awful and paid. Even if they are relatively cheap they represent incredibly poor value for money especially when you consider you can create your own "toolkit" with zero expertise.
• In general they promise much and deliver little.
• They won't make your images better.

I have learned my lesson again. I will stand by my earlier assessment and won't bother with precanned presets, at least for my landscape photography.

One interesting thing to note - when you think about the whole "Colin Prior-style" thing - even if the presets worked as advertised, why would we want our work to look like someone else's? Starting point or not, dependence on presets lead us down a creative cul-de-sac. They rob us of a key step in the process of expressing ourselves through our own images with our own style. Obviously there's tips and tricks to pick up from others but trying to copy their look is not really a worthy endeavour in my book. We need to find our individuality and that doesn't live in presets, no matter how good or bad they turn out to be.

Have you had similar experiences with presets? Or am I missing something? Have you found that presets are a vital part of your process, perhaps being the ingredients you mix into your visual recipe? I'd love to hear your views echoing or disagreeing with my conclusions in the comments.