A version of this post appears today on Shutter Sisters.

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It's probably obvious to most people who know me well (virtually or in the flesh) that I am a creature of the night.  This is partly due to necessity; I work full-time 30 miles from home in a corporate office setting, and therefore, especially during the winter, my daylight hours of freedom are quite limited.  Fortunately, I live in a big city that stays brightly lit long after the sun has gone down, and since I've always been a night owl, I have no problem claiming the title of streetlight photographer.

I've done quite a bit of night photography on the streets around Chicago these past couple winter months, so I created a set of Adobe Lightroom Develop Presets specifically for processing photos that were taken under streetlights or other kinds of orange-ish (tungsten) artificial dim lighting. To see larger photos of these examples, you can go to this gallery of images and click on any thumbnail on that page to see a larger version.  To download a zip file of these presets, click here.  You can view instructions on installing presets here. 

These presets will not impact exposure and brighness, so you'll want to adjust those setting either before or after applying the presets to get the results you want.  Also, since these are specifically for night-time shots that may have required a high ISO, the noise reduction settings will not be impacted by the presets, as you will want to adjust those yourself depending on your personal tolerance for noise.  And while these presets were developed for RAW (uncompressed) files, most of them should work for JPEG files as well; you'll just need to tweak a little more here and there.

I developed some new presets to share on Shutter Sisters a last fall and never got around to posting them here, so here you go.  If you want to see a gallery of these presets, click here.  To download a zip file of these presets, click here. 

These presets are non-destructive to basic exposure settings for the most part, so you will want to apply the settings AFTER you have corrected things like exposure, fill light, black, brightness and contrast.

Hope you enjoy!

I updated the Presets I had originally uploaded for a Shutter Sisters post.  You can go read the post here.  You can download this updated set here.  Click on the photo above or here to launch a slideshow to preview the various presets.

Now, here's an insight to how I create presets.  I make them based on how I process a specific image (often the preset is named after the original image I developed it on).  Therefore, when you apply one of my presets to your own image, it may look weird.  Feel free to adjust and play around to may the preset look right for your specific photo.  I would especially play around with the exposure and black settings.  I tend to overdo both on my photos because that's how I like it, but it's a personal preference. 

Hope that helps, and hope this inspires you to create your own presets!

I've got a gallery of creative Adobe Lightroom Presets that you can view here.  You can download them for free here.  Please note that this set of presets is geared towards photos that are not too brightly exposed to begin with.  You can always adjust the exposure and brightness and anything else to fit your own photo.

I also have the same set of presets for more brightly exposed photos.  You can view that gallery here and download the presets here.

For instruction on importing presets into Lightroom, check out this video tutorial on PresetsHeaven.com. 

Please note that these presets are developed for use on uncompressed RAW (Digital Negative) files, and not on JPEGS or other compressed file type.  You CAN use them on JPEGS, but you need to be aware that all the effects will be exaggerated, and you will need to tone everything down.