Defocus Control [Lightroom Preset]

Digital photos often feel too sharp. Especially with portraits sometimes every edge is crisp, every pore is accounted for, and every pixel proudly screams for attention. And since in Lightroom, we have no way to bour them a bit. Or is there? With some sideways thinking, Lightroom can actually soften an image in ways that feel natural, organic, and very organic. Not by smearing detail, but by controlling micro-contrast, edge definition, and tonal transitions: the stuff our eyes interpret as sharpness in the first place.

Defocus Control is a Lightroom preset built to take the digital edge off your images.

It uses a large mask over the entire photo with negative sharpness to gently soften details in the photo without blurring the entire frame. Instead of destroying texture or turning skin into plastic, it subtly relaxes edge contrast, creating a more natural, film-like falloff that feels intentional and optical rather than edited.

How to use

1. Apply the Defocus preset - This will apply the mask at 100% wich is too strong most of the time
2. Adjust intensity with the Preset Amount slider (0-100%).
3. The higher the preset amount, the stronger the effect will be
   

Why Soften Your Images?

• to emulate film.
• to take that digital edge off
• to get a more realistic film grain by eliminating details underneath the film grain
• to get a dreamy vibe
• reduce image artefacts
• to simulate the sharpness drop-off of vintage lenses
  

WARNING: Your Lightroom version must be relatively recent.

Defocus Control - Lightroom preset won't work with versions of Lightroom that do not have sharpness adjustments inside their local masks

LICENSE:

Purchase of these Lightroom presets and Camera profiles grants the buyer a personal, non-transferable, and non-exclusive license to use the presets. This license strictly prohibits resale, redistribution, or sharing of the presets in their original or any modified form, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

INSTALLATION:

Copy the .xmp files to the specific folder:

• Windows: C:Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings
• macOS: User Library>Application Support>Adobe>CameraRaw> Settings

Here, you can make as many subfolders and organize the files however you see fit, as Lightroom won't care, and it will load everything.

To learn how to add any presets to Lightroom, you can follow these steps:

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/kb/faq-install-presets-profiles.html