Recently the folks from Delicious Presets contacted me and asked if I’d like to try out their Lightroom presets. I took them up on the offer, they sent me a code to allow me to download their preset collection, and I dove in.

Whoa, Instructions!

I was pleased to see a nice, easy-to-understand user guide that explains not only how to install the presets, but also some tips on what settings should ideally be adjusted before applying the presets. It was a nice touch instead of just sending the user off without guidance.

Black and White Lightroom Presets

I was especially interested in their Black and White presets, as I’ve found that’s one area where I haven’t been very happy in the past with most preset offerings. Although I’ve tried past black and white presets in Lightroom, most of the time if I want to create a great black and white image, I export it to Nik Silver Efex Pro and work it there.

Let’s look at a few examples processed using the presets included in the Black & White Pepper presets collection.

For this first image, of an industrial crane, I wanted to accentuate the hard edges of the crane against the sky. Here’s a color image, along with one after applying a couple of the presets.

The first preset (called BW Shiny Star) did the black and white conversion, then I used a sharpening preset (included from Delicious) called Delicious Sharpen 7 Crispy to give it a bit harder feel.

For this portrait below, after setting the white and black points I applied the Delicious BW Bright Skin preset and it gave the results shown here:

Not bad… this shot obviously needs some finishing work, but as far as the black and white conversion goes, I think it did quite well.

Last example here is a simple architectural texture of an office building in San Francisco. Before, and after applying the BW Black Pepper.

Presets aren’t designed to finalize an image, but they’re a great timesaver to jump through a bunch of processing. I found the various black and white presets from Delicious Presets to be useful, and they’ll be a nice addition to my options when working through images in Lightroom in the future.

They have several other presets available via the Delicious Presets website.