HDR Sunset: Free HDR Lightroom Preset

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 landscape image (RAW format) I took in the vicinity of Montreal.

Using the HDR Sunset Free Lightroom Preset

I created the HDR Sunset preset to be used with images with the extreme dynamic range of light.

The HDR Sunset preset’s primary goal is to reduce the dynamic range of photos by making the brightest areas (highlights) darker and the darkest areas (shadows) brighter.

The most common landscape photography scenarios when we face HDR images are sunrises and sunsets. You always have to deal with the extremely bright areas around the sun and very dark spots in the foreground’s shadows.

The HDR Sunset free preset is the perfect solution for such scenarios.

Look at the histogram of the demo image I took in Zion National Park early in the morning. The image has almost no midtones. Most of the image pixels are very dark or very bright. The HDR Sunset is the right tool for such an image.

First, I applied the HDR Sunset preset.

But even after I applied the preset I still needed to brighten up shadows in the foreground. I knew I needed TOOLKIT presets to fix it.

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

Next, I used the TOOLKIT.

I applied the following adjustments:

10. Open Shadows ++++
32. Vignetting ++
36. Sky Darker ++
42. Midtone Contrast ++++

The Editing Formula: HDR Sunset (10, 32, 36, 45)

And here is the final result:

Free Lightroom Presets Download

Below please find the complete free lightroom presets download (zip) library.