Arabesques - A Collection of Lightroom Presets
The timing of this post is a bit odd given that I'm in the middle of the BLACKDOGEYES project, and shooting nothing but black and white. I really hadn't planned it this way, honest. But what the heck: cue rainbows in a monochromatic expanse! This is ARABESQUES, the latest addition to the collection of 1EYE SOCIETY presets.
Here's an excerpt from the accompanying PDF doc, that provides some backstory:
“I believe in influence and filiation. None of what we create would exist without precedent, without the eye, or imprint, of others. All those marks and scratches left behind for us to decipher and ingest and make our own.
In October 2021, Vanity Fair published an article about a California photographer whose work had just recently been unearthed :
“A few years back, two friends, the photographer Len Prince and the art director Sam Shahid, told me they had discovered a lost archive of photography. It was the work of Joan Archibald, who died in 2019, and had lived the life of a glamorous Malibu party girl in the ’60s and then of an affluent lawyer’s wife dividing her time between the Pacific Palisades and Palm Springs. Unlike most of the ladies of West Los Angeles, Archibald had an undercover artistic identity. Around 1964, she adopted the name Kali and, for the better part of 50 years, produced a huge body of photographic work under that name. Oddly, though she bothered to copyright the terms “Kali Kolor” and “Artography,” Kali only showed her work once, in the early 1970s, in a gallery in Monterey.”
Her images were small explosions, each a wild kaleidoscope of uninhibited colours and textures, resolutely psychedelic, often flirting with garishness. And maybe it coincided with a certain longing for change in my life, but her work struck a chord. Surprisingly, because I've always been wary of in your face processing. In fact, I've frequently suggested that any effect that can be seen is likely pushing too far already. But it's an over-simplification, and I've come to mellow on the subject over time—I believe the truth actually lies in overall coherence.
With Kali the process itself was the object, moving away from photography and into collage and random anomalies that consumed the original image. This was capture as pretext, the first stone in a larger edifice. The process transformed into its own coherent language.
Fast forward two years(ish) and Adobe's introduction of local curves in Lightroom...”
ARABESQUES is a collection of impressionistic presets for Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. They're an extension of the experiments I first published in An Electric Kool-Aid Lightroom Test.
There are nine presets in total:
ARABESQUE 01R
ARABESQUE 02G
ARABESQUE 03B
ARABESQUE 04
ARABESQUE 05
ARABESQUE 06
ARABESQUE 07
ARABESQUE 08
ARABESQUE 09
Note that these are presets, not profiles. The looks are entirely based on masks that are meant to be tweaked and altered (even moved) on a case by case basis. There's little subtlety here: each variation is deliberately intense, graphic, and bold. And although the mix and intensity of colour are always at our control, I don't expect ARABESQUES to become the bedrock of anyone's work. This is solely about fun. The last throes of summer, all beachballs, carousels, and cotton candy.
Tweaked ARABESQUE 07 with added grain.
The collection is a free download for all 1EYE SOCIETY members, along with the rest of the content available on the BENEFITS page.
Btw: I hope this doesn’t come off as a sales pitch. I mean, it is, kinda, but I know times are hard—I'm in the thick of it too. Every item we buy, every service we pay for, has gone up in price, and you have to wonder where this is all going. Is there a breaking point?
But if you do join, thank you. It helps. And while I'd love to just give it all away for free, I can at least promise you that 1) I won't hop on the inflation bandwagon, and 2) I'll keep adding content to (hopefully) make the subscription worthwhile.
Later :)
