In this video we are going to see the totally free Lightroom Develop System in action. This is a complete system of fully stackable presets and brushes that allows you to develop your landscape and cityscape photos in Lightroom, with confidence and ease. It will guide you as much or as little as you like to help you create amazing photos, using your own personal style, all without leaving Lightroom. But this system does not process photos for you — you still need to bring your own creativity. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download it from www.lapseoftheshutter.com.

So, let’s open up Lightroom, move to the develop tab and take a look at the Lightroom Develop System. There are over 1000 fully stackable presets, with descriptive names so that you know exactly what each preset does, before you click on it. At the most basic level, there are 62 one-click recipes, divided into natural and stylised effects, and 11 film emulation presets, plus quick effects and special overlays that provide a firm base for you to build on, through powerful white balance effects. But the real meat of the system is in the detailed effects, that allow you to make global, or more delicate adjustments to your photos.

The dynamic range and structure menu contains 7 types of dynamic range modifications you can make, including HDR, all shown on an easy to visualise sliding scale, along with independent controls over the brights and darks, structure, and detail of your photos.

The colour menu contains revolutionary colour grades designed specifically for landscape and cityscape photographers, with precise and stackable control of individual colours, as well as simple to use boosts, like green foliage boosts, streetlight boosts, or sand boosts, along with special effects like tone inversions. There is a colour visualiser to let you see exactly what colours are present in your photos, to help you decide on exactly which boosts are needed.

The tone curve menu lets you can make easy global changes to tone, or subtle changes to the RGB tone curve to boost colours within your photos, like removing or enhancing colour casts, boosting red sunsets or enhancing blue skies.

Subtle split-toning effects let you perfect the colour balance of your photos, while stylised split toning complements the landscape colour grades.

Also, there are a number of stylisations including various tilt-shifts, light leaks and coloured vignettes, as well as regular vignettes and pre-prepared selections of graduated filters.

If that wasn’t enough, there are also 67 brushes including a suite of sunset, sky/cloud and HDR brushes to unlock photoshop-like powers in Lightroom. These can be used as graduated filters, radial filters or brushes, and cover the same range as the rest of the system with control over dynamic range, brights and darks, structure and detail, and colour, as well as brushes designed specifically for landscape and cityscapes with sunset, sky and streetlight boosts.

This is a very powerful system, that gives you all the power to create the kinds of photos you wanted to make. And best of all, this is all available for free. To download it for yourself, along with the Photoshop Colour Control ActionPack and the Photoshop Landscape Colour Grades, just enter your email below to receive an immediate download link.