I've had Red Giant Looks for some time, but have mainly only found myself using it for outdoor situations. I wondered if those using Looks primarily used certain presets, if you started with a preset and customized it, or if you started from scratch? Because I don't often use black and white effects, I have not found a good Looks effect for indoor, low-light situations such as receptions. If anyone has any tips on getting the most out of this great program, I'd appreciate it. It seems that most of the presets either distort the skin tones past what I prefer, or just look too over the top. I know this is because I haven't really unlocked its full potential yet though.

What's up Michael... i cannot live without Magic Bullet Looks :) It is my favorite plug in for my CS5...not sure if you've seen some of our work but all of them have been graded with Looks...I usually use a preset and then customize it to my liking ..I really only use 4 presets though (No 85, Black and White Crush, Subtle Film..can't recall the other one ) plus the one off bleached look and such...

Cheers!

Kren

I've recently started using Magic Bullet Cosmo. LOVE IT!!! It smooths the skin and really enhances the skin tones. I wish I had bought it years ago.

I have the whole suite and it's sweeet! Except denoiser which has a bug that crashes the host app but they know about it and are working on a solution.

As to presets in looks, I generally reverse engineer them and customize as most are too strong for my taste.
I also like starting from scratch with Colorista II which takes what can be done in looks a step further.

The main thing I'm enjoying is a bit of diffusion and crushing the blacks a little. A hint of bleach in certain scenes works too.

There's some powerful voodoo juice in that software! Don't overuse it!