Preset Ripper is a Lightroom plugin for loading Camera RAW develop settings from other existing JPEG and XMP files. This allows easy copying of other images develop settings and applying presets stored in Adobe Camera RAW format.

Download

Download Preset Ripper 0.2.1444

Example images

Here’s a random picture with no presets applied, showing inside of a snow cannon:

zeroed



interbits
If you are like me, I rarely create presets of my own, instead I just copy settings from some other picture I’ve created. In this case, I’d like to see this as a high contrast black & white image, similar to what I’ve done earlier with this photo, posted in Flickr.

The problem is, that the Flickr image is an old one, and I no longer have it stored in my laptop. I’m also notoriously sloppy with backing up my catalogs, so instead of digging my old backups, I’m now getting the develop settings from inside XMP segment, which is stored by Lightroom on export (XMP segment gets included with develop settings unless you strip all metadata, or use separate tool like exiftool or Metadata Wrangler plugin to remove it)

Preset Ripper makes this process easy: As long as a have JPEG file stored on my hard drive, I can simply select photo in Lightroom, activate the Preset Ripper plugin, select the XMP source and click ‘Rip’.


And here’s the snow cannon with ripped preset:

Note that you cannot just “rip” any image look – the image has to have XMP information with Camera RAW develop settings. This sites blog engine, WordPress, strips XMP data, so you cannot rip data from these two snow cannon images. But feel free to go to my Flickr page, download the JPEG file and try extracting the develop settings.

11 Comments

  1. I’m not sure if I’m following your logic here. You want to create a preset using the Develop settings of an image you have stored on Flickr – an image you no longer have stored on your computer.

    Now, when you uploaded the image to Flickr from Lightroom you exported ALL of the metadata associated with that file (this is an option in LR export, one that I never use). That part I got.

    So you’re then downloading that image back from Flickr onto your hard drive (metadata still intact), and running the plugin to extract the Develop information from the file’s metadata. Is that correct?

    If it is, simply re-importing the downloaded image back into LR would also read the metadata and apply the Develop settings to the image. You could then create a preset from the reimported file, or multi-select images and use the Sync command to apply all or part of the settings to the synched images.

    You may also need to consider Process Versions – if you originally uploaded the image using LR2 for example, it would be using Process Version 2003. LR 3 can access Process Version 2003 but uses PV 2010 as a default and LR 4 defaults to PV 2012.

    I can see a poetential advantage in the plugin in that one need not reimport the ‘base’ image from which you’re extracting information, and once copied to a new image one could create a preset from there if desired.

    Mike.

    P.S. It should be mentioned that for .jpg, .tif, .dng and .psd files, metadata information is stored within the image file. For RAW files, metadata is stored in a ‘sidecar’ .xmp file. For anyone interested, more information on Lightroom, File Management and Metadata is available here: http://bit.ly/LRFmM

    1. Well, you are missing one critical thing. When importing JPEG, Lightroom does not load the XMP develop settings, but it applies its own default values. This is because XMP section has AlreadyApplied=True value in it. There is no direct way to toggle that setting off, and that’s why I wrote PresetRipper.

      Process Versions do not matter, the plugin applies what is specified in the XMP, so its automatically correct.

      Plugin only supports XMP, JPEG files. If you have DNG, it is probably better just to import the file. For TIFF, I can consider adding that later on if there is enough interest.

      And finally, it is not exactly presets, its the final image, I just use “preset” as a short version of “develop settings” 😉

    1. Camera Raw is itself an plug-in for Photoshop, so plugin would have to be only Photoshop plugin, and it does not really suit for the Photoshop workflow in my opinion.

  2. Jarno, you’ve saved my life. I just accidentally applied zeroed XMP settings to all my raw files from a recent shoot. Thankfully, I’d already exported the images as JPEG’s so all I needed to do was use Preset Ripper to get my develop settings back for my raw files. Shame it doesn’t remember crop info as well (joke).

    1. I’d love to support crop as well, but Lightroom has its own restrictions for plugins, not being able to crop anything is one of those.

  3. I really really love this preset. Is it compatible with Lightroom 5? I work in a retouching studio where we have to match the process to a photographers processed JPEGs. It doesn’t always seem to work though. Do you have an updated preset ripper? Thanks!!

    1. The B&W preset shown on page is Process Version 2010.

      As explained here, the ripper only reads develop values if they are embedded in the photo, and I bet there are a lot of reasons why a photographer chooses not to do it. Also, if you use external editing tools, you will lose the original settings even if the final image would be exported via Lightroom (in that case, the sliders are set to defaults when edit comes back to Lightroom)

  4. Hello. It would be nice a plugin like Tone Hacker. To be able to rip a toned B&W image and obtain the RGB curves to be applied later on other images (without having an xmp file)

  5. I downloaded your suggested image. I’ve installed the ripper properly in LR and it shows up. When I click on the file to rip, it takes me to a screen that says “3 seconds” delay. Then nothing more happens. What am I missing? Thanks

  6. Hiya

    So the best thing this does for me is allow me to use VSCO presets I bought for ACR in Lightroom. This is amazing for that. You just go to where the presets for ACR live, find the preset and it gets applied.

    This is cool!

    Michael

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