The Best Lightroom Presets to Emulate the 2000s
Want to get the looks you saw in the early 2000s? It’s here! A lot of us yearn for the days when digital photography was so much simpler. I don’t miss pixel peeping — in fact, we never encouraged it here at the Phoblographer. We know that we’re not alone here, and we’re in love with Retro Digital. Luckily, that’s when we founded the website closer to two decades ago. So we dove into our image archives, looked at how the Adobe Gurus were telling us how to edit, and adapted those methods to create our Retro Digital Lightroom Presets and Capture One Styles. These are in addition to the popular Photojournalism presets that we released a while back.The Phoblographer has a large database of portraits that we’ve shot over the years. So we’ve tested these presets on Canon, Nikon, Sony, Leica, Panasonic Lumix, Olympus, OM System, and Fujifilm RAW files. No matter what camera you own, you’re probably going to like these Lightroom presets and Capture One Styles.The Retro Digital PresetsWe spent a lot of time working on these. When I started my career, I began on the Olympus E510 DSLR. But then I graduated up to the Canon 5D Mk II. Most of the first quarter of this site’s history was made using that camera. So we came up with the idea to look at how to bring back those looks. So we did some experimenting around in both Lightroom and Capture One. What we came up with are editing tools that embrace the grain, sharpness, colors, and white balances of the time.You could buy a Canon 5D Mk II for up to $1,000 — or you can spend less than $40 and get our presets.Here are some samples. The Retro Digital Presets are available for purchase from our shop.C5DMkIIND700SA900LM9Also Available: The Phoblographer’s Photojournalism Lightroom Presets and Capture One StylesEditing a photo using our presetsA total of 20 different presets make up our first Presets Pack. Ten of these are color-based and the remaining 10 are focused on black and white results. We developed these to ensure the results don’t overlap between presets, and keeping in mind that they are meant to help you edit with ease. Some of these are Adaptive presets, meaning they scan your photos for faces and skies and skilfully apply edit masks only to those areas. They were developed by us on Adobe Lightroom Classic and you can even adjust the intensity of the presets using the Amount slider in the Develop moduleThe Phoblographer’s Photojournalism PresetsFor those of you who’d like to use these presets on the go, we have good news for you. You can even upload these presets to Adobe Lightroom (formerly known as Lightroom Mobile), to be able to use them on your mobile devices. Photojournalism Color PresetsUse the sliders below to see the effects of each preset on the portrait.PJ 01 – HKGPJ 02 – Warm BazaarPJ 03 – Bright Street SightsPJ 04 – LA SunsetPJ 05 – Dark Moody BluesPJ 06 – Pastel SunrisePJ 07 – Color BlastPJ 08 – A Hazy AwakeningPJ 09 – Vintage NYC AutumnPJ 10 – Purple HeartBlack And WhitePJ 11 – Monsoon MasalaPJ 12 – Monochrome LightsPJ 13 – Your Parents’ AlbumsPJ 14 – Open Your Eyes TomorrowPJ 15 – Find Me I’m LostPJ 16 – Silver SparksPJ 17 – Gritty MaxPJ 18 – Love The Back AlleysPJ 19 – ND Sky MonochromePJ 20 – Portrait PopThese are available for purchase right now. You can buy the color or monochrome sets separately or buy both of them together at a discount. Visit our online store to buy them.
Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./
HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice."
PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others.
EXPERIENCE:
Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things.
EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc.
FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
