Sleeklens 'Through the Woods' Preset Review

SLEEKLENS LIGHTROOM LANDSCAPE PRESET REVIEW:

When you shoot thousands of images every year, managing and editing can be overwhelming. I will be the first to admit that I often don’t even follow my own suggestions, but of course I should.
In a future blog I will go over some of my processing workflow, however for now, let’s just leave it at that I always import through Lightroom and use that as my main cataloging system.

Lightroom has been a savior for me and it is entirely capable of being the only editing program you may ever need. I always start my editing in Lightroom and can accomplish a large percentage of my processing here.
One of the best and easiest tools that can be used in Lightroom is the use of Presets. Presets are ‘one click’ processing instructions for the program. For example a preset can be configured to automatically set any or all of the sliders available to you in the develop module.

When you have hundreds of images to go through, anything that can help and speed up your workflow is always appreciated. Personally I have many presets loaded into my Lightroom Develop folder as well as many preset brushes, many which I hardly use but at least they are available. After using presets for a while you will find you have favorite ones and may even venture into creating your own ones.

A few months back I was asked by the people at https://sleeklens.com if I would be willing to review their product. I agreed, and as I shoot a lot of landscapes I tried out the following set of presets available from them: https://sleeklens.com/product/landscape-lightroom-presets
Full disclaimer here, I am in no way compensated by the company so this will be my unbiased impression of the product.
Their “Through The Woods” package comes with 80 presets and 42 brushes intended for landscape editing. Many other packages are also available.

I won’t go through an actual ‘workflow’ of using presets but will show some sample before/after images below, using some of the included presets from Sleeklens. In the samples I have done nothing else to the images. So the before shot is the raw file straight out of the camera, and the after image will only be with one of the presets.
It is fair to say that presets should be considered as a quick ‘starting point’ only. Even with all the presets I have, I will also tweak some of the sliders in the develop module to my preference.
When I first tried out these presets I will admit I found them a little ‘too overdone’ for me, especially their sharpening. Part of the reason for that is most times I export from Lightroom to Photoshop to do my finishing touches. However, using Lightroom as a stand-alone editor along with the presets, I can see where it would work. Also, as with anything else, the more you use it the more comfortable you will get with it.

Sleeklens has done a good job making their presets ‘stackable’. What this means is you can start at the top of their list and apply a ‘global’ preset to the image, then scroll down and add other presets such as exposure, colour, tone, polish, and vignette. After that you can use some of the included brushes for localized editing.

Final Verdict: all in all Sleeklens has done a good job of providing a large variety of tools to help speed up processing. Pricing is reasonable and I found no issues with the software. For me some of the preset’s sliders were slightly overdone, but of course those are all easily changeable.
For those looking to speed up their landscape image processing this product could be very helpful.

They are available here:

https://sleeklens.com

https://sleeklens.com/product/landscape-lightroom-presets/

Scroll down to see a few sample images of the presets being applied.

Sleeklens Through the Woods- ‘Calm Sunset’ preset. Before (raw file) on the left, after (Sleeklens preset) on the right.