Crwiwy Loc: Devon UK

In LightRoom 5.6 I have several folders of Develop Presets and in some of them the files have been numbered to form a logical sequence.

To make sense of my user presets I renamed them - in their folder - in a similar sequence but the numbers do not show when I open LightRoom - only the original names.

When I ask LightRoom to show me its Develop Presets folder it goes to AppData/Roaming/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets as I would expect and is the folder I am working on.

I tried copying the presets into a new folder and renumbered them into an useful sequence but - although LR shows the new folder - the preset names are the same as they were before renumbering and different from the names in the file.

All my experiments show the same result so What am I doing that LR doesn't like - or what is LR doing that I don't like?

tsilva Loc: Arizona

Are you using lr to rename or doing something stupid like renaming them outside of lr?

Macronaut Loc: Redondo Beach,Ca.

FOUL!!!!! Un necessary roughness!:x

BHC Loc: Strawberry Valley, JF, USA

Ten Meg penalty and half the distance to the troll bridge. Still First Down!

Racmanaz Loc: Sunny Tucson!

How to Find Missing Photos or folders in Lightroom.
This may help you with the renaming of folders or photo's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oQMNy0PVE0

DwsPV Loc: South Africa

You have to create and rename the folder INSIDE of Lightroom. If you create it in the file/folder structure of your hard drive, LR will not "see" it.

So create your preset in LR, then right click on the preset and rename it.

What you can try: - where you have User Presets, right click on that and then on the Import function, then Import from your hard drive. That way they should be there each time you open up LR.

blackest Loc: Ireland

your making the mistake of thinking lightroom relies on the filename :)

I've put the short answer in bold, the long answer may be interesting, but really you don't really want to hack a preset.

lets take a look at my lightroom preset for fluorescent lighting which is a develop preset. It was made quite simply by taking a raw file and applying the fluorescent preset in raw and then copying the whitebalance and tint settings and adding it as a preset in user.
If we look at the preset path. its
something/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets/User Presets/Fluorescent3800+21.lrtemplate

It's worth noting that User Presets is a default folder for, well User Presets. You might use say peter paul and mary as folder names inside develop. This allows presets to be folded so you might only see the presets in peter and not mary and not paul thats handy because how much looking do you want to do finding a particular preset.

I might be better to have blackest as a folder name and inside that a folder called white balance. Well maybe not blackest as that might be confusing but something sensible.

Ok so now lets take a look at the file.

Fluorescent3800+21.lrtemplate in text edit (it is just a text file really that lightroom recognises as a preset).


Ok some of this is kinda logical, some a little less obvious , it looks like a version of xml

id is probably a unique identifier for this preset that lightroom generated, that and uuid seems to be similar. I would pretty much bet that those numbers probably identify me and my lightroom license number in a masked kind of way *

internalName = "Fluorescent3800+21",
This is your problem because this is the identifier that lightroom knows your preset as, not the file name!

title = "Fluorescent3800+21",
This is its name in the preset menu also your problem

type = "Develop", //kind of obvious, type of preset
value = { // settings and uuid
settings = { // the settings for this preset
ProcessVersion = "6.7", //maybe corresponds with the version of raw
Temperature = 3800, //the color temp to use
Tint = 21, //the tint value
WhiteBalance = "Fluorescent", //that is the lightroom setting for the white balance i used, (i just want to apply the balance to jpeg files which don't have temperatures and tints on display)
},
uuid = "95875C51-5736-447F-9B62-CDC0DFD065ED",
}, // a hex string, base 16, A,B,C,D,E,F are used as numbers
version = 0, //my first version of this preset probably
} //end of preset so lightroom stops reading

Ok so thats my rough understanding of this preset.
when lightroom starts up it reads all the preset files and puts them as rows of data in a presets table. Probably uuid or id are key values to identify the settings. It doesn't really matter to us.

Can we modify these values in this file, maybe, but it maybe that one of uuid or id may be a hash and the contents and the hash wouldnt match if something changed and lightroom would judge the preset to be corrupted and unusable.

So no we shouldn't mess with this file outside of lightroom, we don't fully understand it. So what can we safely do?

Well apply it in lightroom to an image then copy the settings and save as a new preset, but only the values we want to change!


lets say we copy the unchanged black level then you would have something like blacklevel=0 in the list of settings to dial in so now my preset changes the white balance and also sets the black level. Which is not desirable, so keep your presets as simple as possible. I think the values are absolute rather than relative so if you had a preset that increased exposure 2 stops applying it twice wouldn't increase exposure 4 stops. Might not be the case for everything though.

When you think about it the xml sidecar file is just one big preset file for one photo and thats what your development is really creating a preset for an image.

*
in a database passwords are salted which basically means there is a routine applied to the password which produces what looks like gibberish when you login the routine is run on your password and the gibberish is compared with the gibberish stored for your saved password
if they match your in. Your password is unique to you so I can't just look at the password table and find out your password, however i can set up a new account with a password say called pass if i paste that passwords gibberish into your acc passwords gibberish, replacing it then your password is now pass and i can use your account. It really should be hard for me to get that much access to the database though. Not every database design is secure and some idiots store passwords and other confidential information as plain text. Which is why you get headlines like 4 million ___ customers have their info leaked from the companies database.

papakatz45 Loc: South Florida-West Palm Beach

Great instructional response. Not!!!

altheman Loc: Christchurch, New Zealand

When I look at my Lr presets I see that they are in Alphabetical order. I also noted that Lr room puts the folders in alphabetical order hence my presets that I have created go into a folder called Alans Presets, so they are at the top and not the bottom of the folder tree.
So instead of numbering your presets perhaps you could assign them names alphabetically eg A-basic, B-vignette etc so that they fall in the order you want

Crwiwy Loc: Devon UK

As I have so many I need the numbering system to group similar - eg exposure compensation may be 2.1, 2.2 ext.

Crwiwy Loc: Devon UK

I knew that Adobe Lightroom was a pedantic old bugger but this is one step further than I thought.

So black mark for me for trying to do something that LR doesn't want me to - and black mark for Adobe for not allowing more flexible working (yes, I know that the catalogue needs to work the LR way.).

Crwiwy Loc: Devon UK

Thanks for a clear, detailed explanation which has fully explained my query and added to my knowledge of LR.