A photographer who lost all their Lightroom presets following a catalog corruption built a super helpful tool to recover their precious editing presets, which were built over a decade-plus of careful photo editing.
“My Lightroom catalog completely died last month. Corrupted beyond repair. Tried everything, repair tool, backups, recovery software. Nothing worked. Never thought this could happen, lesson well learned. 10-plus years of editing gone. These weren’t just random sliders, they were my workflow, my style, countless hours of tweaking gone to trash,” writes Reddit user iusemydogshampoo.
When they tried to find solutions online, they came up empty. The few options available seemed “sketchy,” would have required giving up data, or were locked behind a paywall. So instead, they took matters into their own hands and built a tool themselves, which is now available online at colorsuite.app.
The tool is extremely straightforward and requires users to simply drop any JPEG image containing Lightroom data into the interface. The web app then extracts .xmp data and camera settings, showing all the edits made to the file via a familiar Lightroom-inspired interface. The user can then download the edits made to that file as a LUT or .xmp, which can be easily added to Lightroom as a new preset.
“I also added some before/after examples with all the grading details so you can see exactly how different edits impact a RAW file,” the creator says on Reddit. “I’ll keep adding more examples as I go.”
They add that everything happens on the browser, and they do not download any data that users upload to the platform. Further, “it’s free and always will be.”
“I cannot express with words how happy I am that you exist,” responds Redditor FOTOJONICK. “The hero we need!”
Another user, andrevvve, adds, ” I lost all of my Lightroom presets last year and had to rebuild from scratch. I’m caught up now but to have the ability to access the older edits is insane. I just tried it out and it worked. THANK YOU! you are a godsend.”
The tool can also be used to learn more about how other photographers edit their photos, assuming they edited them in Lightroom and preserved Lightroom’s metadata when exporting files.
“You can also visualize the edits that were applied to the photo in an interface similar to Lightroom,” iusemydogshampoo writes in a comment. “That’s a great way to learn color grading by reverse engineering the edits of other photographers.”
Like prior tools that have accomplished the same thing, like PixelPeeper, which now lives behind a paywall, photographers could use colorsuite.app to “steal” premium presets if other photographers do not strip metadata. However, that is already possible by dropping the same .jpg files directly into Lightroom.
Photographers who do not want their editing presets available for swiping through Lightroom or tools like colorsuite.app can remove metadata when exporting their edited images in Lightroom. It is possible to strip this data while preserving copyright and ownership information. In some cases, popular image-sharing platforms, like Instagram, automatically strip this type of data during uploading.
However, a tool like colorsuite.app is excellent for photographers who perhaps have access to all their edited photos but lost their presets or maybe never even had a preset in the first place but would like to recreate an editing style of theirs.
Creator iusemydogshampoo says they plan to make the tool open source. But for now, since the tool relies upon standard HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, anyone is free to poke around on the colorsuite.app website using their browser’s developer tools.
Image credits: Photos by Jeremy Gray, screenshots show colorsuite.app
Source link
