Advice on buying presets for lightroom?

I am considering purchasing some nice presets for Lightroom, made by professionsl photographers. I want to do this in order to save me some time when editing RAW files from my shoots. If nothing else, the purchasable presets from other more skilled users of Lightroom should give me a good baseline, and also some creative ideas / options when I'm stuck with what to do!

But there are so many presets to choose from.. Has anyone bought presets before, and can give me their opinions on them? Are there some better ones out there that I should go for?

I'm sure some of you think that this is a waste of money, but I am kinda new to Lightroom and I am not interested in spending loads of time to make my own presets. I'd rather spend some money.

I got a bunch with an LR3 trainning DVD from Kelby. I do sometimes use those presets as a starting point.

If you are purchasing for the reason of using them for ideas, there are some available online that are free. Google the terms and try those, it may help you to choose from the ones you may pay for.

Ricku,

Have you checked out our Raw Conversion thread? Not much talk there about presets, but a ton of great examples of what can be done that include screenshots of the processing details:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=684360

Thanks for the info guys!

Personally, I'd say don't do it, unless there is something very specific that you want.

There are some really great free presets available. The ones I can think of off the top of my head are:

Matt Kloskowski's free presets, at www.lightroomkillertip​s.com

OnOne has 2 or 3 sets of free ACR/lightroom presets. http://www.ononesoftwa​re.com …rfect-presets-camera-raw/

Some links I have collected: http://photographersre​sources.rachelbaine.co​m/links/

Yes, stick with the free ones. I recently bought the Totally Rad Presets collection during a Black Friday sale and so far not getting much from them. I still use my free ones as starting points.

Lightroom comes with a bunch of presets that provide numerous "effects" and it's a simple matter to pick one that has some appeal, see what settings were applied, then adjust things to your own taste and then save your own "personalized" preset. I'd say that would be a lot more effective than shelling out money for a whole bunch of other presets where you would end up doing the same thing (if you wanted to have your own "style"). Getting an understanding of how the various processes in Lightroom work on your images is, in my opinion, the key to effective use of the program.

While some of the paid ones are great. There will be ones exactly the same some place for free. That said a preset is never a final image on its own. They always need some tweeking. Unless you happen to shoot exactly like the author does.

THere are a ton of free ones allover the web.

http://www.presetsheav​en.com/
Over 1000 here.... http://www.prophotosho​w.net …s-the-ultimate-free-list/