Our new Lightroom Presets Online Store can be found here: http://propresets.com
We’ve also updated the web store with a new set of great presets called “Film Master Kit” which you can read more about here.

Take the opportunity and get 20% OFF during this weekend on ALL Products (The deal Ends on 4th Dec, this Sunday) .

Use coupon code: NEWSTORE in your shopping cart before checkout. 

Oh, and presetsheaven.com will still be free and continue to deliver presets ;-)

It’s like standing on a scene having 10.000 people in the audience in front. Pretty cool, so today we will throw a nice deal to that audience, but the deal is only valid for 24 hours!

Visit http://pro.presetsheaven.com and get the “4 IN ONE” for $55 instead of $110! 

The 4 IN ONE kit includes the following Master preset kits:

Wedding Master Kit

This set of 20 Lightroom presets really boosts your photos and make great impact on your clients. It includes all kinds of styles you’re looking for a wedding session.
See the presets in action

Black & White Master Kit

If you’re into black & white photography this kit is for you. includes a combination of 10 (+1 bonus) black & white presets. These presets can make your photos look antique or modern. It’s your decision and you make it with just a click in Lightroom.
See the presets in action

Portrait Master Kit

As a portrait photographer you probably want to make subtle changes to your photos since theses photos often are family portraits. But occasionally you get a chance to show your clients what a portrait “really” could look like instead of the regular ones they are used to see. Take the opportunity and impress your clients with extravaganza.
See the presets in action

Fashion Master Kit

Fashion photography is probably the the style most photographers want to achieve or work with. If you have the correct light, model and setup the job is easier made. But if you’re in lack of that for some reason, a preset could help you out more than you think! Put some glamouring style to your photos.
See the presets in action

With so many presets to chose from, your Lightroom preset library can easily be filled up quickly. Most of the time you probably only use a couple of your favourite presets, the rest of them just lay there (just in case). I know that many of you download a preset here as soon as I publish it. After all they are free and we humans like free stuff right? :-)

Save time, cause time is money!

As a professional photographer you want to speed up your work-flow as much as possible without the loss of quality.
I’ve received lots of mail from you asking me for some kind of collection of the best presets available out there. Apparently many of you want to keep your preset library clean with only the presets you can trust giving you a confident result each time.

I’ve been busy like a bee for some time now making this possible for you!

Today I have the great  pleasure to present the brand new sister site: Pro Presets

Pro Presets is a service for those of you who work as professional photographer or struggling to be one. The site will offer you different collections of preset to chose from. At the end of the day you won’t need any other presets than these ones!

Some of you are into Wedding photography while some just love Black & White or Portrait photography etc. Because of this widely spread interest, you will be able to find a Lightroom Master Kit that suites your own style and work-flow. We will keep developing new kits to make sure your genre/style is included!

But what’s going to happen with presetsheaven.com then?
Calm down…I will of course continue to publish free presets for the rest of you who don’t want to go PRO!

One downside of Snapfish at that moment, was that the client was quite buggy (at least on my computer). The quality of the prints in the book was also not that astonishing, as I would like them to be.

The day I bought my new Macbook, the possibility to use Snapfish ended. I never got the Mac-version of the software to work out. From what I’ve heard today, they are using an online service instead of a downloadable software client (as they did before).

Two of my books (A trip to India and Thailand) have been ordered from Blurb. Since I’m a regular Mac user now and I like the idea of having a client installed to make my books, they’ve been my No.1 choice. Good price, fast delivery and a very nice client to work with when editing the books. The quality of the prints could be better though. I think the color could be more vibrant than what they are (even on premium paper).

Anyway. It’s hard to compare the quality of the paper/prints if you’re not ordering an exact copy of the book from each provider.

I have recently tried a new online service called Photobox.com. Mainly because I wanted to update my portfolio coffee-table book that I bring to the clients I meet. I thought is was a great opportunity to try a new service.

I must say that the quality of this book is the best one of all the ones I’ve done so far!

The book that I made has 96 pages, a hard cover and premium paper (option). It took me around 1 hour to make the book even though I’ve never tried their service before. To round things up I would like to point out a few thing that came to my mind while I was working with the book.

Great stuff

• Web based (works on all platforms, PC or Mac etc.)
• Simple interface and usage
• Autofill (One click and your book is filled with the images you’ve chosen)
• Many different templates
• Premium book options (Select paper quality, cover etc)
• Payment choices (I like the possibility to use Paypal)
• Multilingual

Not so great

• No software client (Some of us would like to be able to work offline)
• Price indication (You don’t see the price of your book until you’re finished to order. I would like to see what the difference, adding a page or two, would make on the price while I’m working with the book.)
• The price (Although the quality was great I think that $130 is quite much for a 96 pages book. I paid $72 for 122 pages at Blurb with shipping included)

I recommend using Photobox if you’re looking for great quality and a simple interface to work with.

There are tons of online providers out “there”.
What is your choice of provider when it comes to photo books? Please leave a comment below.
Thanks!

Vince is a web designer by day, amateur photographer everywhere in between. When he’s not busy being a husband or father, you can find him modding gadgets in his basement, playing in Photoshop and Lightroom or snooping around abandoned buildings. You can check out his photos on Flickr here.

Congratulations Vince! The book will be in your hand within a week or two.

I would like to give a big “THANK YOU” to BenBella Books who was kind and sponsored this contest!

Now you can be one lucky winner of “The Accidental Millionaire” – A book by the unconventional entrepreneur and world-famous photographer Gary Fong. Together with BenBella Books I now give you the chance to win a copy of this fantastic book. The rules of this contest are simple. Just follow the instructions below and you might be the lucky winner in the end of February!

Who is Gary Fong?

In The Accidental Millionaire, photographer, entrepreneur and inventor Gary Fong, turns traditional self-help upside down, his life story a delightfully refreshing testimonial to the power in all of us to harness our fate by not allowing ourselves to be so driven, that we lose the divine clumsiness necessary to stumble into hidden opportunity.

In The Accidental Millionaire, Fong recounts with self-deprecation humor and grace the unexpected trajectory of his life and career: launching his first photography studio out of his parents’ back bedroom that was soon earning hundreds of thousands of dollars annually; the mistake that becomes a bonaza when he buys a printer that far exceeds his needs and uses the excess capacity to start a new business he eventually sold for a startling profit; developing his signature “storybook” system of wedding photography that he transformed into a lucrative software company, which has since become the industry standard; and founding a multimillion dollar international plastics enterprise through his invention of the Lightsphere, now considered a standard piece of equipment for photographers worldwide,  that began as a doodle on a paper napkin while he was flying across country.

Read what others say about the book? (Opens in new window)

How to enter the contest?
All you have to do is to copy this text below and tweet it on twitter:

I might be a winner of “The Accidental Millionaire” by Gary Fong, #contest @presetsheaven @benbellabooks | http://bit.ly/93igns

This contest will be closed 2010-02-28
2010-03-01: CONTEST IS CLOSED!

Rules & restrictions

• Anyone found to use multiple twitter accounts to enter will be ineligible.
• Posting multiple entries in a single day will not be accepted
• The winner will be randomly chosen.
• Winner will be contacted by Direct Message in Twitter.

CONTEST DETAILS
The giveaway runs from January 12th until midnight MST January 25th, 2010.
Three shoulder harnesses will be given away, so there are three chances to win.

HOW TO ENTER
There are several ways in which to enter, each giving the entrant a certain number of entries into the contest, such as posting the contest on Facebook or on a blog.

For complete contest rules and entry guidelines, visit http://www.mybinocularharness.com/Contest.html

So if you are an owner of an iPhone I suggest you download this free app and give it a go:-) You find the app in iTunes and on this page: http://app.strobox.com/.

Click on each image to view in full size:

I’ve just made a special social network for all of you who are interested in photography, post-processing, sharing thoughts and everything related to it. Facebook is great but it’s about just everything. The Social Photo Network I’ve started are for those who like to share thoughts, photos, videos with others who have the same interest. You can even start your own blog! Live chat with others, invite your friends, create groups and events for others to join. Check out the screenshots below and when you’re ready to get started, Join the party HERE

OK, I’ve seen enough :-) I want to Join the party.

Scott (Principal Photographer) mailed me and asked if I knew any good way to be able to just export the images to an FTP server.
He just needed a quick way to export his clients images into a folder on a server.

After some Googling without great results, I downloaded the Adobe Lightroom SDK and started to play around. Fortunately a sample plugin for FTP-uploads was available! So within a couple of hours I think I have saved, not only Scotts’ workflow-time in Lightroom, but a bunch of others who are looking for this feature in Lightroom. This is actually just a rip-off the sample plug-in that Adobe delivers with the Lightroom SDK. I’ve just put a logo on it and made it public to the rest of you!

Screenshots:

Download the PH FTP Upload Plug-in and see the installation/usage video tutorial below:
Update (091031): Due to complaints from Sean McCormack (see comment below) I have removed my PH logo in the plugin. If you want to have a “clean” plug-in you have to download the new one.

NEW: FTP Upload for Lightroom 3.0:

4580 Downloads

FTP Upload for Lightroom 2.0:

3963 Downloads

Please read:
In this video above I’ve just put my plugin on my desktop. You should put your plugins in a folder you won’t delete since Lightroom uses the plugin from that directory. If you delete the plugin from that directory, your plugin will be removed from Lightroom! Make a new folder called “Plugins” and place all of your plugins in it…

For LR2 users, you can place your plugins in this folder for convenient storage/usage (create the “plugin” folder):

Thx Jeffrey for the “Plugin”-folder tip.

What’s new in Lightroom 3?

There are so many new things so you should really download a copy of the beta release yourself, to try them out.
Scott Kelby from Photoshop Insider has written a great post about some of the new features. Check it out:

(1) Importing has been redesigned with a new import window that lets you easily see where your images are coming from and where they’re going, with lots of little improvements and enhancements to make the process easier and much more visual.

(2) Drag and Drop Publishing to the Web (and more). Now you can just drag and drop an image to have it automatically published directly from Lightroom right up to Flickr, or directly to an iPhone sync folder, etc..

(3) Pro-level Noise Reduction. This is an area that Lightroom always lagged behind on, but now they have real pro-level noise reduction which competes, or beats, about anything out there (especially because it can do its noise reduction at the Raw file level, rather than on a processed 8-bit file).

(4) Built-in Film Grain feature. There’s been a lot of buzz recently about bringing back that film-grain look, and now that’s built right in.

(5) Better vignetting by a long shot. They really enhanced the post crop vignetting, and now post crop gives you a much better looking, and more natural result (and you have two choices for the type of vignetting effect as well).

(6) You can finally (finally, finally!!!!!) export a slideshow with music embedded in the slideshow (at last), and you can have your slideshow automatically sync the length of the slideshow to the length of your song. Plus, they made it so, on a Mac, you don’t need to use iTunes to host your slideshow music.

(7) Real watermarking is here! Now you can create real watermarks, at different sizes and opacities, and put them where you want them, for both web and print.

(8) Create print layouts with photos wherever you want them. Now there’s a Custom Print Package feature that lets you put as many photos, in whatever shape and size, on the page wherever you want them (you’re no longer restricted to use a grid of uniform cells), so now you can really come up with some creative print layouts without having your hands tied.

(9) You can change the background color for prints. Now you can choose any color as your background for printed pages. I know it sounds like a little thing, but it’s big.

(10) The Collections panel is now in the Develop Module, too. This one addition will dramatically increase your efficiency because now you don’t have to constantly switch back and forth between the Library Module and Develop Module, because you can get to all your collections and images from right within the Develop Module itself.

Check out these three videos to see what’s new in Lightroom 3:

Part one:

- Library and develop modules
- New streamline import function
- Improved sharpening tool and color noise reduction
- More natural vignetting and… Add Grain!
- Faster!

Part two:

- New ways to share and publish images (Direct access to your Flickr account)
- Add sound to your slideshows
- Custom package in the Print mode for better layouts
- Edit watermarks (text or image)

Part three:

- 25+ new features
- New crop presets
- Sort images based on cropped size
- New option for overlay info in loupe view
- Turn autosync (new feature) on and off in the loupe view
- Create and import new folders and images easier
- “Show photos in subfolders” easier to set on/off
- New improved Collection functions
- Lock library filters
- Filter images on flash state
- Find missing files
- Back-up on exit
- Access to Collections in the Develop mode

For more details on the new functionality in the Lightroom 3 beta:

• Read the blog post from the Lightroom team to learn about the vision behind the features included in the beta.
• Find helpful resources on the new NAPP Lightroom 3 beta Resource Center.
• Read the release notes (PDF) for detailed information.

Download now

Lightroom 3 SDK for developers will be released when Lightroom 3 is out on the market (according to the Adobe forum)

Look for this toolbar in the sidebar and click on the language flag to pick your translation:

Turn this into Japanese?:

Sure, no problem, just click on the flag for Japan:

The Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2.5 update includes these enhancements:

Additional camera support for several new camera models including:

• Nikon D300s
• Nikon D3000
• Olympus E-P1
• Panasonic DMC-FZ35
• Panasonic DMC-GF1

Several corrections for issues introduced by previous Lightroom 2 releases

New in Lightroom 2.5

The goal of this release is to address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom 2 and provide additional camera raw support. A comprehensive list of issues fixed in this release is included below:

Lightroom 2 Bugs – Fixed

• Lightroom 2.4 on Windows continued to display the import dialog when a memory card was detected regardless of the preference setting “Show import dialog when a memory card is detected.”
• Lightroom 2.5 includes a correction to the demosaic algorithms for Bayer sensor cameras with unequal green response.

See the Lightroom 2.5 ReadMe file for additional details.

Download Lightroom 2.5

I’ve focused on the main content to speed things up. Sidebar is gone in this version as well. I hope you like it cause it looks great on my iPhone. Please let me know if you have any issues browsing the mobile version.

Both Lightroom and Camera Raw adds additional raw-support for another 31 cameras, including Canon EOS 500D, Nikon D5000 and 18 Hasselblad models (See complete list below).Beside this the specification for the Digital Negative (DNG) format is updated. DNG is an open archive format for raw-data from cameras. DNG is the answer to the problem with every individual camera and its raw-format. It helps the user to secure the readability of his/her files in the future. For more information about the updated specification for DNG, see www.adobe.com/dng.

Price and availability

The update for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.4 is free to all Lightroom customers and Camera Raw 5.4 is available as a free update for customers with Photoshop CS4 (mac & win), Photoshop Elements 7 (win), Premiere Elements 7 (win) and Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac. For more information and downloads, visit: www.adobe.com/support/downloads
Direct url to download page for Windows users of LR:  http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4508
Direct url to download page  for Mac users of LR: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4507

New support for Cameras and Digital back pieces

Canon EOS 500D (Digital Rebel T1i /Kiss X3 Digital)
Canon PowerShot SX1 IS
Epson R-D1x
Hasselblad (3FR files only) CF-22, CF-22MS, CF-39, CF-39MS, CFH-22, CFH-39, CFV, 503CWD, H2D-22, H2D-39, H3D-22, H3D-31, H3D-39, H3DII-22, H3DII-31, H3DII-39, H3DII-39MS, H3DII-50
Kodak EasyShare Z980
Nikon D5000
Olympus E-450
Olympus E-620
Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1
Pentax K-7
Sigma DP2
Sony A230
Sony A330
Sony A380

For more even more information, visit Lightroom Journal -  The official Lightroom blog.

The wallpaper is available in different screen sizes but if you need a size you can’t find below, just send me a comment and I’ll make a new one.

Available screen resolutions for download:

1569 Downloads

973 Downloads

850 Downloads

832 Downloads

940 Downloads

I’ve noticed that many of you have links on your site that refers to mine (great!). If you like, you can replace that link in your sidebar/page with one of these new PH banners I’ve created. Please let me know if you need another size of the banner.

Banner 1 (180*70px):

Code (select and copy to your site):
<a href="http://www.presetsheaven.com" title="I'm a big fan of Presets Heaven"><img src="http://www.presetsheaven.com/social/phbigfan_180px.gif" alt="I'm a big fan of Presets Heaven" style="border:none;"/></a>


Banner 2 (200*70px):

Code (select and copy to your site):
<a href="http://www.presetsheaven.com" title="I'm a big fan of Presets Heaven"><img src="http://www.presetsheaven.com/social/phbigfan_200px.gif" alt="I'm a big fan of Presets Heaven" style="border:none;"/></a>

Banner 3 (250*70px):

Code (select and copy to your site):
<a href="http://www.presetsheaven.com" title="I'm a big fan of Presets Heaven"><img src="http://www.presetsheaven.com/social/phbigfan_250px.gif" alt="I'm a big fan of Presets Heaven" style="border:none;"/></a>

Please let me know if you are using any of these banners on your site, write a comment :-)

Take care and have a nice day!
//Pierre

Today (2009-04-08) I checked out some statistics for Presets Heaven…

312 people are subscribing to my weekly newsletter subscription (was 40 ppl. Oct 2008). Use the subscription field in the sidebar to start a subscription.

348 people are following me by twitter

+2000 are following me by RSS subscription (was 400 ppl. Oct 2008)

The site have been saved 477 times on del.icio.us

Yesterday I had ~6000 pageviews from all of you.

Top Posts:

1. 34 free Black & White film presets for Lightroom 14,368 Views
2. Boost your photos with these new presets. 11,398 Views
3. 10 free Dave Hill presets for Lightroom 11,266 Views
4. Naturally BW – The sweetest black and white preset so far 11,178 Views
5. 10 great video tutorials for Lightroom 11,117 Views
6. 8 Epic Lightroom presets for weddings… 9,830 Views
7. 18 free Color Print Film Emulation Lightroom presets 9,466 Views
8. A lovely preset for wedding photography… 9,401 Views

Most popular presets:

1. PH Naturally BW
   Downloaded 9334 times since 13th Oct 2008
2. CWP Boost
   Downloaded 8766 times since 13th Nov 2008
3. MikeyGs Black and White Film Presets
   Downloaded 7068 times since 27th Oct 2008

Want to add a RSS PresetsHeaven widget to your netvibe, google, apple dashboard or windows? Or why not in your sidebar? Check this out: http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/305438/presetsheaven-your-source-to-free-presets

Thank you all!

I just returned from a two week holiday in Thailand. I’ve been lying in the sun most of the time, done some scuba diving and just having a blast. Oh I did one BIG thing in my life… I asked my girfriend to marry me! She said YES and I’m so happy now. I will post some photos from this trip as soon as I have gone through them, so stay tuned for that if you’re interested :-)

Right now I’m going through all the e-mails I’ve recieved during these two weeks. I will continue to update the site with new presets as soon as I have  unpacked my travelbag :-)

Oh, I don’t speak spanish but I found this videocast today. They mention my site in the end of the video, but I don’t understand what they say more than my name and “Presets heaven” :-)

Link to publisher: http://menosde3.com/?p=193