Last Updated on 03/26/2020 by Chris Gampat
ComparePresets is a brand new website that’s letting photographers figure out which presets will work best with their cameras.
I’m a little shocked that ComparePresets wasn’t available sooner, or rather that this idea hasn’t been around much longer. Pitched to us a while ago, we’ve been playing with ComparePresets for months now in its various iterations. And today, it’s launching in full glory. The website lets you navigate through the world of presets with a lot of ease–and absolutely free too! The navigation and the defining process are pretty straightforward and all this lets photographers figure out exactly what they want. In fact, it specifically does this through a blind taste test first. In all honesty, I didn’t like it at first. But then I realized that this is probably for the best.
In ComparePresets, photographers first select one of many professional cameras from Canon, Nikon, Sony or Fujifilm. Then they choose the genre, an image that they want to render, and finally whether they want a black and white photo. This process will appeal mostly to those who make taxable income from their photography–and we’re remiss to say that it’s for professionals or amateurs necessarily. Of course, anyone can use this, but Professional and Semi-Professional photographers will probably get the most use out of the website. This is evidenced by the genres available. All of them typically involve people–and they revolve around the genres that professional and semi-professional photographers and content creators.
Each of the genres have a number of images that you can choose from. The variety is nice because it appeals to a number of different styles of shooting. Then choosing whether or not you want color or black and white will appeal to others for obvious reasons.
After this process, you look at a number of renders of the image you selected. From those, you’re shown a couple of others. And then a couple of others. After a while, you’ll be recommended a few presets that you’ll like. This is a blind test; which is more effective at helping a photographer in my opinion. While you’ll probably sit there and say, “I want the Mastin Look,” you probably mean something more along the lines of VSCO. You’ll learn a lot. To get the most from the website, I really recommend doing your test a few times.
While I think that it’s effective, ComparePresets still has a lot of work to do. For example, on the launch, the portrait section had no images of men. Why? I also just think that there needs to be a larger library of images. Ideally, I think that photographers should be able to upload a low-resolution image of their own while retaining their copyrights or being given the option o providing Creative Commons permission. You can check out ComparePresets for yourself by heading on over to their website.