Presets are intended to give quick access to routine commands, such as increase brightness, sharpen, remove noise, or add saturation; presets can be applied to queues of images and this can save you a lot of time. Just add images to a queue, choose a preset, start the queue processing and then go take a rest while Helicon Filter processes your images. Read more about using presets with queues here.
The name of a preset tells what it does. Presets show up as buttons on the Presets panel and as options in the main (and popup) menu and as options of the button.
When you first launch Helicon Filter, you'll see the pre-existing presets that we created and pre-loaded for you, but you can easily create your own presets and delete the default ones by going into expert mode. In order to switch to expert mode, activate the Expert mode panel.
A preset is a file that contains the parameters for one or more filters. The filters in Helicon Filter are Brightness, Colors, Noise, Sharpening, Distortions, Text, Retouching, and Frame. A presets file is only intended to be processed by the software and not meant to be read by a person. Nonetheless, if it were readable, the contents of one would look like something like this: brightness: +20; contrast: - 2; sharpening: +20; put date and time in the bottom right corner.
Sometimes it's useful to save a preset in the same folder as the one with the images for which it was created. That way you can remember which filters you applied to your images, and you can still reuse this preset for other images. For example, if you processed several images and you want to remember the parameters for the future, save your parameters as a preset and then save the preset to the same folder as the images. This way it will be easier for you to find the preset later on. In order to save a preset in the same folder as the images, go to the main menu and select .
A preset for several filters contains the parameters for several filters, such as, for ex., brightness, colors, resizing, and frame parameters, all in a single preset.
The presets for several filters appear as options in the main menu, as in the following:
The presets for several filters also appear in the popup menu when you right-click on the Thumbnails panel (with one or more images selected); then you can apply one of the presets to the selected images:
On the Presets panel you can see the presets for several filters when no filter is activated at the moment; when any filter is activated then you see the presets for this active filter.
The presets for several filters should be saved into either the Presets library or the folder with the images for which the preset was created. The Presets library is a special folder: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Helicon\Filter\5\presets\Common\.
A preset for one filter contains the parameters for a single filter only, such as the parameters for brightness or colors, for example. When you switch to one of the filters then on the Presets panel you will see the presets for one filter; and when no filter is activated you can see the presets for several filters.
In expert mode, you also get quick access to the presets for a specific filter through the button. If you click on the arrow to the right of the button, a drop-down menu with the presets for this filter will appear. This menu also allows you to save and load presets.