One preset to rule them all (or maybe two).

When it comes to photography, there is always the need to edit our photos and give them a little punch, as they say, at least for me. For years, I have used many tools to accomplish this, including Snapseed, VSCO, and Darkroom. I never ventured too much into tools like Lightroom, I have always found them overwhelming.

My software of choice for the past year or so has been Darkroom, primarily, on iOS/iPadOS. The app has gotten better and better over the years, I’d even dare say comparable to Lightroom. On its most recent update, they added the ability for users to share their presets which is super-cool and all of them are great. I have downloaded just about all of them to my devices. Although having all these remarkable presets and options to edit my pictures is nice, it also presents a problem, the problem of choice.

Whenever I sit down to edit my photos, I find myself “scrolling” and adding all these presets and choosing whichever gives me the results I like. But that also means that all my pictures have different “voices” rather than one voice that defines my style of photography. Perhaps I am severely overthinking it, but I prefer to have fewer choices. That being said, not every photo I take is taken under the same conditions, so perhaps my go-to preset, might not suit a specific shot, which makes having choices a good thing.

I am definitely overthinking this!

Maybe I just need to pay more attention to which ones I use the most and delete the rest. So far, I find myself using the same two, one of the app’s default ones. For black and white, there are three different ones I go to that have been shared.