Monochrome color profiles in Lightroom Presets

Most cameras have multiple black and white (or monochrome) color profiles. These are also designed for JPEG shooters and are not very practical for raw users. The best way to convert a photo to black and white in Lightroom is to set the treatment to black and white in the base window.

Color profiles and white balance

Color profiles work with your camera's white balance setting to control the colors in your photos. For example, when taking portraits, you can set the profile to portrait and white balance to cloudy to give your portraits  pleasantly warm color cast.

Just like with the color profile, you can set the white balance in Lightroom when using the raw format. This way you can decide how cool or warm your photos should be during the development phase.

Portrait was developed with the portrait color profile and cloudy white balance. The result is warm and flattering.

Color profiles and Lightroom Develop presets

Most cameras have less than ten color profiles. This doesn't seem like much, especially when compared to the variety of film types available to photographers 20 years ago. With Lightroom, however, you can create your own custom color profiles. The way to do this is to create a development preset.

Suppose you like your camera's portrait color profile, but want the colors to be less saturated. In this case, you can create a portrait in Lightroom using negative vibration or saturation settings to reduce the intensity of the colors. You can also adjust the saturation settings in the HSL / Color / Black and White panel. Then create a new development preset that stores these settings and name it something like Portrait Preset.

Click the plus icon in the Preferences panel to create a new development preset.

Decide which settings you want to include in the new development preset by ticking the appropriate boxes. Give the preset a name and click Create.

Now you can apply this preset to any photo you want by clicking it in the Development panel in the Presets panel. For example, I developed the following portrait by making adjustments to the HSL / Color / Black and White and Tone Curve panels.

Once you are familiar with using the Lightroom Tone Curve and HSL / Color / B&W panels to control the color, you can create some very nice Lightroom presets that you can use for your photos. Alternatively, you can use the knowledge of other photographers and buy development presets created by someone else.

Conclusion

You can probably see that the usefulness of color profiles depends very much on your personal workflow. When you use JPEG format, both the color profile and white balance settings determine how the colors in your photos are output. Therefore, it is very important that both settings are correct when taking the photo.

However, if you're like most photographers and you're shooting raw, you can leave this decision until the post-production phase. You can go even further by using Lightroom's color control tools to change the colors in your photos.