I have to confess that I had been ignoring Adobe Lightroom for a long time, without a real reason. What a shame! I still like Photoshop, no other software in my opinion offers the advanced tools and flexibility that it does. But do I really need all these tools for my daily photo processing? I don't think so. When you have to manage and process hundreds or thousands of photos, speed and simplicity gets more crucial. Lightroom covers 90% of my editing requirements, and for the rest I use Photoshop. (If you haven't tried yet, you can download a 30-day trial version of Lightroom 2 here)

Presets even makes things better for Lightroom. I know advanced users will prefer to use their own settings but still there will be times when you want apply a specified set of settings with a single click. This is where the presets come in to play.

Yesterday I have found this post on Digital Freak, with a download link to a collection of 600+ free Lightroom Presets. I didn't have time to play with all of them yet but wanted to share with you first. Some of the presets are very useful, some of them not, but it is always possible to fine tune the presets and provide more desirable effects, or totally delete the ones you don't like and keep the rest.

If you have difficulty installing and managing the presets, I recommend you to read this very helpful tutorial on Prophotoshow.com

---