It’s here! A lot of us yearn for the days when digital photography was so much simpler. I don’t miss pixel peeping — in fact, we never encouraged it here at the Phoblographer. We know that we’re not alone here, and we’re in love with Retro Digital. Luckily, that’s when we founded the website closer to two decades ago. So we dove into our image archives, looked at how the Adobe Gurus were telling us how to edit, and adapted those methods to create our Retro Digital Lightroom Presets and Capture One Styles. These are in addition to the popular Photojournalism presets that we released a while back.
The Phoblographer has a large database of portraits that we’ve shot over the years. So we’ve tested these presets on Canon, Nikon, Sony, Leica, Panasonic Lumix, Olympus, OM System, and Fujifilm RAW files. No matter what camera you own, you’re probably going to like these Lightroom presets and Capture One Styles.
The Retro Digital Presets
We spent a lot of time working on these. When I started my career, I began on the Olympus E510 DSLR. But then I graduated up to the Canon 5D Mk II. Most of the first quarter of this site’s history was made using that camera. So we came up with the idea to look at how to bring back those looks. So we did some experimenting around in both Lightroom and Capture One. What we came up with are editing tools that embrace the grain, sharpness, colors, and white balances of the time.
You could buy a Canon 5D Mk II for up to $1,000 — or you can spend less than $40 and get our presets.
Here are some samples. The Retro Digital Presets are available for purchase from our shop.
C5DMkII
ND700
SA900
LM9
Also Available: The Phoblographer’s Photojournalism Lightroom Presets and Capture One Styles
A total of 20 different presets make up our first Presets Pack. Ten of these are color-based and the remaining 10 are focused on black and white results. We developed these to ensure the results don’t overlap between presets, and keeping in mind that they are meant to help you edit with ease. Some of these are Adaptive presets, meaning they scan your photos for faces and skies and skilfully apply edit masks only to those areas. They were developed by us on Adobe Lightroom Classic and you can even adjust the intensity of the presets using the Amount slider in the Develop module
For those of you who’d like to use these presets on the go, we have good news for you. You can even upload these presets to Adobe Lightroom (formerly known as Lightroom Mobile), to be able to use them on your mobile devices.
Photojournalism Color Presets
Use the sliders below to see the effects of each preset on the portrait.
Black And White
These are available for purchase right now. You can buy the color or monochrome sets separately or buy both of them together at a discount. Visit our online store to buy them.
