MEET THE CREATIVE

He’s With the Band

Level up with concert photographer Greg Noire’s Lightroom presets.

Concert photographer Greg Noire has shot everyone from Childish Gambino to Travis Scott to Cardi B to Janelle Monáe. His work is visceral and instantly recognizable, capturing an artist’s power and grace onstage, often in equal measure.

But it wasn’t long ago that Noire was a college student working in the photo center of a big-box store in his native Houston. He spent hours with other people’s pictures before finally deciding to try his own hand.

Noire’s Clean Cut preset lights up this image of King Princess performing at an Apple Music event.

“At first, I was just taking my point-and-shoot around campus, shooting as much as I could,” he says. That meant parties, portraits, and work with the student newspaper. But when his cousin set him up with a gig photographing a Houston hip-hop group called the Niceguys, something clicked.

Today, Noire is a fixture on the music scene. He’s been shooting Childish Gambino since 2013 and has become a familiar face at Lollapalooza, Coachella, and other festivals.

Greg Noire’s secret? A photographic eye and a forward-thinking mindset. “I put as much positive energy forward as I could,” he says.

“It seems silly, but when I started I wrote a note that said, ‘I will shoot Coachella,’ and put it in my wallet,” he says. “I put as much positive energy forward as I could.”

Then in 2019, Adobe asked Noire to create a series of Lightroom presets that would evoke his signature style. “I tried to approach it as ‘What would people like to see in their own black-and-white photography?’” he says. “One filter offers a little more clarity, one creates a softer image, some have a film grain.”

It’s not a click-and-run thing. It’s a click-and-make-your-own-adjustments.

The Clean Cut preset, for example, is a simple black-and-white filter that Noire often uses to get started. “It’s clean with a little bit of grain,” Noire says. “And it’s a little overexposed intentionally, to add a bit of gravitas.”

Elsewhere, such presets as Katana, Kunai, and Shinobi apply differing degrees of contrast, overexposure, and grain. And you might have noticed, all his presets have ninja-inspired names. “I’m a nerdy, anime-type person,” he says. “When you’re in the photo pit shooting music, you approach it as a ninja. A ninja doesn’t want to be seen.”

Noire’s Shinobi preset adds a mysterious mood to this portrait of Omar Apollo, shot at an Apple Music event.

The presets, he stresses, aren’t designed to make you an instant Greg Noire. “It’s not a click-and-run thing,” he says. “It’s a click-and-make-your-own-adjustments. When you import an image and click the preset, it’s not going to be perfect. It’s up to the photographer to ensure all the elements make sense.”

To get the presets, download them as a ZIP file using the link below, then import them into Lightroom on Mac. With a Creative Cloud subscription, they’ll automatically sync to Lightroom on all your devices.

They won’t make you Greg Noire overnight. But they’ll help you get a little closer.