Lightroom does not have layers, and sometimes I’d really like to have noise textures applied on my photos. I figured out that although it is not possible to create presets with brush adjustments from user interface, it is possible to create preset with text editor that contains brush adjustments.

With handcrafted preset file, I can create a spot noise texture, like this (applied on a square 80% gray image). As you can see, the effect is very subtle here, but you can adjust layers parameters using the standard Lightroom brush adjustments.

Here’s the preset applied on a processed photo:

And here’s the same photo, but without noise texture layer. You really can’t see the noise texture, unless you know that it is there. I think this technique is useful, it adds a bit more character to some photos.

Finally, here’s the download link to Lightroom preset: CaptureMonkey_Spotty_Noise_Texture.zip. The preset works with both Lightroom 3.x and 4.x.

Comments

comments

4 Comments

  1. hi,
    so basically you’re typing all this in manually by hand in a textfile and save as *.lrtemplate?? or how does this exactly come about…. is it somehow possible to do similar with ie a scanned imagefile of film-grain and what would be the steps needed? thanks.

    1. Basically yes, though I made a script which did it for me, since typing brush stroke coordinates can get quite tiresome after few thousand lines.

      Sure, it is possible to use scanned image as source, but you probably need lots more brush strokes. I thought about it, but I didn’t have any decent film damage patterns so I gave up.

      1. ok – thanks for the fast reply here,jarno; and thats ‘unfortunately’ what i figured… making a replica of an image via brush coordinates in a text editor – daaaamn, a lot of typo and probably no amount of scripting is gonna do much here for ya’;o) except perhaps for the standard template order…
        best
        ron

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