Today’s Question: If you apply a preset that includes “Remove Chromatic Aberration” and “Enable Profile Corrections,” will the thumbnail strip at the bottom indicate that a given image has undergone an adjustment in the Develop module? I like the thumbnails to remain “clean” so I know which images are completely unaltered.
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, if you apply a Develop preset to an image the status will be updated to indicate that it has had adjustments applied. That will include the display of a badge indicating that adjustments have been applied if you have enabled those badges for thumbnails.
More Detail: I prefer to include adjustments such as chromatic aberration removal and profile-based lens corrections with a preset I apply when importing new photos into Lightroom Classic. You can also apply a preset in batch at any time, as I explained in the Ask Tim Grey eNewsletter on October 19th. In either case, the thumbnails for images will display a badge indicating that adjustments have been applied, as long as you have those badges enabled.
In other words, images will be marked as having been adjusted in the Develop module even if you didn’t directly apply adjustments in the Develop module. Applying a preset at import or later in your workflow (such as with the Quick Develop option in the Library module) still counts as having applied adjustments in the Develop module. This makes sense, of course, since presets really represent saved settings from the Develop module.
So, if you prefer to not have images marked as having adjustments applied unless you intentionally applied those adjustments, you should not apply a preset in batch to a large group of images. Instead, if you’re going to use a preset as part of the process of applying adjustments, you should be sure to only apply that preset to the specific images you’ll be working on, so that only those images will be marked has having been adjusted.
