Advantages of using SA Preset Sample Collections

First, recall that complete samples of SA V4 presets are available at:

https://app.box.com/s/ou9mtenbjgx5g4ul1b18uaqr3mcxiius

 while complete samples of the V5 presets are now available at:

 https://app.box.com/s/ro2sv5aph45yo49bzbz75q6rym8pu7l6

 Here are some reasons why such comprehensive samples of Studio Artist presets can be very useful while working with SA--and in particular, when used in a versatile image viewer such as Lightroom (LR examples below).

 

1. Each of the main types of SA preset--Paint Synthesizer, Image Operation etc--contains many thousands of presets in nested collections and categories that would take forever to open and fully test in SA itself, with only tiny SA output thumbnails as a guide. But full-size samples in an LR window can quickly show samples at any level--category, collection, or all of the collections in a type at once, or even all 12,000 or so samples in all SA types.  This way, it is much easier and faster to zero in on specific presets that might be of interest to you.

2. LR can also be used to keep track of your initial choices. Eg suppose you've used the samples method on the 7,000 or so Paint Synthesizer presets, and found 38 that initially look interesting. Well, you could put them in an SA Favorite presets collection, but that's premature at this stage, because you haven't yet even initially tested any of them on your own images. Also, if you chose samples from different main SA types, it would be very confusing to try to keep track of them in a single Favorites collection. 

 But LR makes it easy to put each sample in an LR-specific collection, and a right click on any one of them easily identifies which SA type, collection and category it comes from, so it's trivial to find the corresponding preset in SA.  Also, any presets that fail in your testing can be summarily deleted from the LR collection.  Then finally, only those that survive your rigorous testing can be put in an SA favorites collection of truly valuable presets.

 Even after this successful SA favorites stage, the LR sample collection method can still be very useful.  Suppose, that, several months or years later, you now have more than 20 SA Favorites collections.  But how do you remember what differentiates each from the others, and the specifics of each preset within them?   If you have saved the LR sample collection for each successful SA Favorites collection, you can immediately display their large-size samples to remind yourself of what made them attractive to you.  Also, if there was some striking image that you produced in your own testing of a specific preset, you could readily substitute that for my generic preset sample in your LR catalog, and so personalize your LR displays to whatever images work best for you as a memory aid.   

 

3. Perhaps, like me, you sometimes remember or half-remember the name of some interesting preset? Eg was it something circle-like?--but a search on 'circle' would exclude 'circular' in preset names.   So within SA, you search for 'circ', eg in the SA Paint Synthesizer, and end up with 140 or so listed presets.  But now, all you have to go on are the tiny SA thumbnails for each preset--and worse, they were run on many different original images, so direct comparisons are impossible. 

 However, if you run the same search on your LR V5 Paint Synthesizer preset samples, you'll immediately be able to see all of the named results in good detail, so that it's very easy to quickly compare them, and zero in on the exact one you want.  Indeed, for me, and perhaps for you too, this one kind of use alone is enough to make it worthwhile to download the samples, and make them search-ready by importing them into LR.  Also, in LR you can make the search as global or local as you like, whereas in SA preset searches are type-specific only (in all Image Operations, etc).

 

4. So you've created some SA presets of your own, either by modifying standard ones, or from scratch. Wouldn't you like to compare them with standard SA presets, to see the differences and similarities?  Well, the simplest way to do this is to run them on my Original Image_Sailboats.jpg file (yes, everyone is very welcome to use it).  By so doing, you are guaranteed that your sample result will be directly comparable with any of the 16,000 or so preset samples from V4 and V5 that were also produced from that very same original image.

 To be clear, for present purposes it's of no interest whatever who produced that image, nor whether it's even a decent photograph.  All that matters is that you now have direct comparability with this universe of SA sample outputs.  Find out if yours is original or not, and if it is, in what significant ways!

 

5. Finally, if you discover other interesting ways for using these comprehensive preset sample collections in conjunction with SA, please post them here so that we can all benefit from them--thanks!

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