Snowy Day: Free Snow Lightroom Preset (zip download)

Snowy Day

Free Snow Lightroom Preset

Compatible with Lightroom 5, Lightroom 6, Lightroom Classic and the Creative Cloud (CC), and Lightroom Mobile.

How to Use Free Lightroom Preset

If you need help with the free Lightroom presets installation, please check my dedicated tutorial here: How to Install Lightroom Presets

My free Lightroom presets work with images in different formats (RAW, JPEG, PNG, TIFF…). But I highly recommend using a RAW format, which offers the most flexibility and produces the highest quality.

If you need RAW images to practice Lightroom preset based editing, please visit my free library of RAW images. Fee free to download and use them for practice: Free RAW Photos for Editing

For the demonstration, I used the outdoor portrait image.

Using the Snowy Day Free Snow Lightroom Preset

When we photograph and edit the snowy scenes, we face two main challenges.

First, our camera meter is always gets fooled by bright snow and sets the wrong exposure. The photos get underexposed.

To overcome such a challenge, we need to use Exposure Compensation to boost the exposure before taking the shot.

Ultimately, we can set the correct exposure in Lightroom during editing. But it is preferable to get it right in the camera since underexposed images will always have more digital noise.

The second challenge with snowy scenes is the blue color cast. You do not get perfectly white snow, especially during sunny days; you get an unnatural snow scene with a strong blue color cast.

For more details and tips, please read my tutorial How to Photograph and Edit Snowy Scenes here.

The goal of photo editing in Lightroom is to remove the color cast and make the snow appear as natural as possible.

The Snowy Day preset is designed for editing winter scenes with the open sky and sunny weather. Its function is to balance the dynamic range and to reduce the blue color cast.

Let’s see how the Snowy Day preset works in a real-life scenario.

Below is the photo I took during the sunset. The sun is setting on the right side, but it is outside of the frame. The snow, especially in the shadows, has a prominent blue color cast.

Let’s see how we can correct it.

First, I applied the Snowy Scene preset and analyzed the image to see if it needed more adjustments.

I did not need to balance exposure because I boosted it by more than a stop before taking the shot. I used Exposure Compensation.

Below is the histogram of the unprocessed image.

But I still needed to boost contrast and add a stronger vignetting.

For such final tweaks, I used the TOOLKIT adjustment presets.

The TOOLKIT is the collection of Adjustment Presets. The presets allow fine-tuning of a photo without altering the style and Lightroom editing tools.

You can download the TOOLKIT Adjustment Presets, which is part of my free Travel Preset Collection, here: Free Travel Preset Collection