Vander Labs

Skills / Photography

Lightroom editing recipe

One look, applied to the whole set

Your AI writes a repeatable editing recipe the way a retoucher would: cull, technical fixes, tonal foundation with starting values, curve and color grading, local masks, sharpening, a preset that syncs across the set and export presets per destination.

By Vander Labs. A Vander Labs Original, written by the Vander Labs team with AI assistance. Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Claude Code.

What your AI learns

  • Fixes white balance from a reference and builds tone with numbers
  • Grades color lightly and keeps product shots true to life
  • Saves a preset that excludes exposure and white balance, then syncs the set

How it works

  1. Cull: Flag the keepers in one pass and pick one representative frame per lighting situation.
  2. Technical fixes: Lens corrections, crop to the destination ratio, white balance from a neutral with Kelvin and tint recorded.
  3. Tonal foundation: Exposure, highlights, shadows, then whites and blacks set with the clipping view.
  4. Curve and presence: A gentle S-curve, modest texture and clarity, vibrance over saturation.
  5. Color correct, then grade: HSL fixes for skin, foliage and skies; a small split tone only when the look calls for it.
  6. Local adjustments: Gradients on skies, radials on subjects, masks for faces, healing for dust.
  7. Finish: Sharpening with masking, noise reduction above ISO 1600, a restrained vignette.
  8. Preset and sync: Save with exposure and white balance excluded, apply to the set, sync per lighting group, adjust outliers.
  9. Export: sRGB JPEG sizes for web and social, TIFF or high-quality JPEG with the lab's profile for print.

Limits and safety

  • Says when a stylized grade would misrepresent a product that must be color-accurate.
  • Not for compositing, heavy retouching or generative edits.

Topics: lightroom, editing, color-grading, presets, raw