A Lightroom preset is a saved set of Develop settings that you can apply to any photo with one click. To use one, open a photo in the Develop module and click the preset’s name in the Presets panel on the left. To make one, edit a photo, click the + icon at the top of the Presets panel, choose Create Preset, tick the settings you want it to hold, name it and click Create.
Every photographer eventually notices a pattern in their editing. You reach for the same white balance adjustment, apply a similar tone curve, and nudge the same HSL sliders on image after image. That pattern is your editing style, and presets are how you capture it.
Presets are often misunderstood. Some photographers dismiss them as a lazy shortcut. Others treat them as buttons that will fix any photo. The truth is in between. A well-made preset is a starting point that applies your baseline creative decisions instantly, freeing you to spend your time on the adjustments each photo needs. It is a workflow tool, not a replacement for knowing how to edit. This guide covers how presets work, how to use them, how to create your own, how to install presets from other sources, how to organize a growing library, and how to fit them into your photography workflow.
How to Use a Lightroom Preset, Step by Step
Applying a preset takes seconds. These steps are for Lightroom Classic; the cloud-based Lightroom works the same way through the Presets button in its Edit panel.
- Open the photo in the Develop module. Select it in the Library grid or the Filmstrip and press D.
- Find the Presets panel. It sits on the left side of the Develop module. Click a group’s triangle to open it.
- Preview before you commit. Hover over a preset’s name and the photo shows what it will look like.
- Click the preset to apply it. Its settings replace the matching sliders on the photo. Settings the preset does not hold are left alone.
- Adjust the strength. If your version shows an Amount slider at the top of the Presets panel, drag it below 100 to soften the preset or above 100 to strengthen it.
- Refine for this photo. Correct the white balance and exposure for this particular image, and make any local adjustments it needs.
To apply a preset to many photos at once, select them all in the Library grid, then choose the preset from the Saved Preset menu in the Quick Develop panel on the right. You can also apply it to one photo in the Develop module, select the others in the Filmstrip, and click Sync to copy the settings across.
To undo a preset, press Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on a Mac), click an earlier step in the History panel, or click Reset at the bottom right of the Develop module to return the photo to Lightroom’s default settings.
What Exactly Is a Lightroom Preset?
A Lightroom preset is a saved collection of Develop module settings. When you apply a preset, it moves the corresponding sliders and tools to the values stored in the preset file. Think of it as a recipe card for an edit. The recipe says “set Exposure to +0.3, Highlights to -40, Shadows to +25, Temp to 5800, and apply this specific tone curve.” Lightroom reads the recipe and sets all those values at once.
Presets can include any combination of settings from the Develop module: Basic panel adjustments, Tone Curve, HSL, Color Grading, Sharpening, Lens Corrections, and more. They can also be partial, meaning they only adjust certain settings while leaving others untouched. That idea is what makes presets flexible, and it gets its own section below.
Preset files are small text files (with .xmp extensions in current versions, or .lrtemplate in much older ones) stored in folders on your computer. They are not image files and contain no pixel data. They are simply instructions for Lightroom to follow, which is also why applying a preset never harms the original photo: every Lightroom edit can be changed or reset later.
How to Create Your Own Presets
Creating your own presets is more valuable than downloading someone else’s. Your presets reflect your eye, your style, and the specific editing decisions that define your work. Here is the process.
Step 1: Edit a Photo to Your Satisfaction
Start by editing a photo the way you normally would. Work through the editing process until the image looks the way you want it. Pay attention to which adjustments you make, because these are the settings your preset will save. For a good general-purpose preset, work with a photo that represents a common shooting scenario for you, whether that is outdoor portraits, landscapes, street photography, or whatever you shoot most often.
Step 2: Open the Create Preset Dialog
In the Develop module, click the “+” icon at the top of the Presets panel on the left side, then choose “Create Preset.” In Lightroom Classic you can also press Ctrl+Shift+N (Cmd+Shift+N on a Mac) while in the Develop module. A dialog box appears with a list of all the settings that can be included in the preset.
Step 3: Choose Which Settings to Include
This is the most important step and where many photographers go wrong. You do not need to include every setting. In fact, including settings that should vary from photo to photo will make your preset less useful.
Settings to include: Tone Curve, HSL adjustments, Color Grading, Sharpening defaults, and Lens Corrections are usually safe to include because they tend to be consistent across your style. The Presence sliders (Texture, Clarity, Vibrance) can be included if you have a consistent preference.
Settings to think carefully about: White Balance, Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks depend heavily on the individual photo. Including them means the preset will override whatever the original exposure was, which rarely works across different images. If you include these, expect to readjust them for every photo.
Settings to usually exclude: Crop, Spot Removal, and local adjustments (masks, gradients, brushes) are specific to individual images and should almost never be included in a preset.
Step 4: Name and Organize
Give your preset a descriptive name that tells you what it does at a glance. “Warm Film Look,” “Moody Desaturated,” or “Clean Portrait Base” are much more useful than “Preset 1” or “My Favorite.” Use the Group menu in the same dialog to put it in an existing group or choose New Group to make one. A good naming convention pays off once your library grows beyond a handful. Click Create, and the preset appears in the Presets panel under that group.
The Art of Partial Presets
Partial presets, those that only modify certain settings while leaving others untouched, are far more flexible than presets that change everything. Understanding this turns presets from clumsy one-click effects into precise workflow tools.
Consider building a system of partial presets that you stack on top of each other:
Base presets that set your overall tone and color style (tone curve, HSL, color grading). These define your general look.
Adjustment presets that modify specific settings like sharpening amount, noise reduction level, or lens correction preferences. These handle technical defaults.
Effect presets that add specific creative effects like grain, a split tone, or a vignette. These are optional finishing touches.
By building small, focused presets rather than all-encompassing ones, you can mix and match to create different looks without starting from scratch each time. Apply your “Warm Film Base” preset, then stack your “Medium Grain” preset on top, then add your “Subtle Vignette” preset. Each one adjusts only its own settings, leaving the others intact. The order matters only where two presets touch the same setting: the one applied last wins.
How to Install Presets from Other Sources
Whether you download free presets, buy a pack, or receive presets from a fellow photographer, installing them is straightforward.
Installing in Lightroom Classic
In the Develop module, click the “+” icon at the top of the Presets panel and choose “Import Presets.” Navigate to the preset files (.xmp or .lrtemplate) and select them. Lightroom copies them into its preset folder and they appear in the panel immediately. Current versions can also import a .zip file of presets directly; if yours will not, extract the files first.
You can also place preset files in Lightroom’s preset folder by hand. Go to Preferences > Presets > Show Lightroom Develop Presets, which opens the folder in your file manager. Copy the preset files into this folder (or into a subfolder for organization), then restart Lightroom.
Installing in Lightroom (Cloud Version)
Open the Edit panel, click Presets, open the three-dot menu at the top of the presets list, and choose “Import Presets.” Navigate to your files and select them. The cloud version accepts .xmp and .lrtemplate files. Imported presets sync to every device signed in to the same account, so installing once makes them available everywhere.
Installing on Mobile
The Lightroom mobile app supports presets as well. If you use the cloud-based Lightroom, presets installed on your desktop sync to mobile automatically. Some preset makers also distribute mobile versions as DNG files: open the DNG in the app, then save its settings as a new preset from the app’s menu so you can apply them to your own photos.
Organizing, Exporting and Sharing Presets
Groups. Presets live in groups, which appear as folders in the Presets panel. Create a group when you save a preset (Group > New Group in the Create Preset dialog), and drag presets between groups in Lightroom Classic to reorganize them. Right-click a preset to rename it, delete it, or move it.
Exporting. Right-click a preset in Lightroom Classic and choose Export to save it as a standalone .xmp file. Send that file by email or cloud storage, and anyone can import it with the steps above. This is also the simplest way to move presets to a second computer if you use Lightroom Classic, since Classic does not sync presets between machines on its own.
Backing up. Your preset folder (Preferences > Presets > Show Lightroom Develop Presets) is worth including in your regular backup alongside your photos and catalog.
Evaluating Downloaded Presets
There are countless presets available, from free packs to paid collections. Not all of them are useful. Here is how to evaluate them.
Test on multiple images. A good preset works reasonably well across a range of photos with different exposures, lighting conditions, and color palettes. A preset that looks great on the maker’s sample photos but poor on yours is not useful. Apply any new preset to at least 10 to 15 varied images from your own library before judging it.
Check what settings they change. After applying a downloaded preset, look at which sliders moved. Some presets make sensible, balanced adjustments. Others push sliders to extreme values that only work for a narrow range of images. Presets that set Exposure, Highlights, and Shadows to specific values are less versatile than those that focus on color grading and tone curves.
Consider the source. Presets made by photographers who use them in their own work tend to be more practical than presets made purely as a product to sell. Look for presets from photographers whose actual work you admire.
Free is fine to start. There is nothing wrong with free presets for learning and experimentation. Use them to see how different settings affect your images, then create your own presets based on what you learn.
Using Presets Effectively in Your Workflow
Presets pay off when you fit them into your editing workflow rather than treating them as standalone solutions.
Apply Presets on Import
During import, you can assign a Develop preset to all incoming photos from the Apply During Import panel. Every photo then starts with your baseline adjustments already applied. If you have a standard look that you apply to most images, this saves applying it by hand every time. Choose a subtle, versatile preset for this, one that makes good default adjustments without dramatic creative effects.
Lightroom can also apply a baseline to new imports without any preset. See how to change default develop settings.
Use Presets as Starting Points, Not Endpoints
This is the most important principle of preset use. Apply a preset, then refine the settings for the specific image. Adjust the white balance to match the actual scene. Tweak the exposure for the brightness of this photo. Fine-tune the color grading to suit this particular subject. A preset should get you most of the way to a finished edit; your refinement does the rest.
Photographers who apply a preset and call the image done are missing the point. Every photo has characteristics that a generic preset cannot anticipate. The real editing skill is in the refinement.
Batch Editing with Presets
When you have a series of photos shot in similar conditions (a portrait session, a set of landscape photos from the same location, an event), presets make batch editing efficient. Edit one photo until it looks right, save the settings as a preset (or copy the settings with Ctrl+Shift+C / Cmd+Shift+C and paste them with Ctrl+Shift+V / Cmd+Shift+V), then apply those settings to the whole batch. Go through each image and make small individual adjustments for differences in exposure and composition.
This approach can cut editing time on a large set from hours to minutes. Wedding and event photographers use it to process hundreds of images while keeping a consistent look.
Building a Personal Preset Library
Over time, you will collect presets that reflect your personal style and common editing patterns. Here is how to build and maintain a useful library.
Start with Your Most Common Scenarios
Create presets for the situations you meet most often. If you mostly shoot portraits outdoors, create a base preset for that. If you shoot landscapes at golden hour, create one for those warm conditions. If you shoot events in mixed lighting, create a preset that handles the usual problems of that environment. Three to five scenario presets give you a practical foundation.
Create Variations
Once you have a base preset you like, create variations. A “Warm Portrait Base” preset might spawn a “Warm Portrait, Soft” variation with reduced clarity and a subtle fade, and a “Warm Portrait, Vivid” variation with more vibrance and a stronger S-curve. Two or three variations of each base preset give you flexibility without overwhelming choice.
Organize with Groups and Naming
A practical group structure might look like this:
Base Looks: Your core creative presets that define your overall style.
Portraits: Presets tuned for portrait work, including skin tone adjustments.
Landscapes: Presets designed for outdoor and nature scenes.
B&W: Black-and-white conversion presets with different tonal qualities.
Effects: Grain, fade, vignette, and other finishing presets.
Technical: Sharpening, noise reduction, and lens correction presets.
Use consistent naming within each group. Prefix related presets with the same word so they sort together. “Film Warm Soft,” “Film Warm Vivid,” and “Film Cool Matte” all share the “Film” prefix, making them easy to find.
Review and Prune Regularly
A preset library that grows without pruning becomes cluttered. Every few months, scroll through your presets and delete the ones you never use. If you have not applied a preset in six months, it is probably not earning its place. A lean library of 20 presets you actually use beats 200 you have to scroll past every time.
Creating Presets for Specific Photography Genres
Different kinds of photography call for different preset approaches.
Portrait Presets
Good portrait presets put flattering skin tones and a clean overall look first. Reduce the Orange Saturation slightly in HSL to keep skin from looking too vivid. Add a gentle lift to the shadows on the tone curve to soften dark areas. Include moderate sharpening with a high Masking value to keep skin smooth while eyes and hair stay sharp. Leave out Exposure and White Balance, since these vary widely between indoor and outdoor portraits.
Landscape Presets
Landscape presets can include more settings because landscape conditions are often more predictable. Include a tone curve that adds richness, HSL adjustments that deepen sky blues and warm vegetation, moderate Texture and Clarity for detail, and lens corrections turned on. Consider separate presets for golden hour (warmer), blue hour (cooler), and overcast conditions. For more on landscape editing, see editing landscape photos in Lightroom.
Black and White Presets
Black-and-white presets offer wide creative range because color is removed from the equation. The B&W Mix panel (which controls how each color translates to a gray tone) is the heart of a B&W preset. A preset that darkens blues and cyans while brightening oranges and yellows creates the dark-sky, bright-skin look of a red filter on black-and-white film. Another might brighten greens and yellows for airy, high-key landscapes. Three or four B&W presets with distinctly different tonal characters give you versatile options.
Film Emulation Presets
Film-look presets are popular because analog film has qualities many photographers like. The usual ingredients are lifted shadows (the tone curve’s bottom-left point raised), slightly muted highlights, reduced overall saturation, and visible grain. Different film stocks have different color signatures: some lean toward greens and blues, others run warm with rich oranges and yellows. Study reference images shot on the film you want to emulate, then match its color response with the HSL panel, the tone curve, and Color Grading.
More Preset Techniques
The Amount Slider
Current versions of Lightroom show an Amount slider when you apply a preset. It lets you dial the preset’s adjustments down (or up). If a preset looks slightly too strong, drag the Amount slider to 70 or 80 instead of tweaking every setting by hand. This is especially useful with downloaded presets made for a more dramatic look than you prefer.
Adaptive Presets
Current Lightroom versions support adaptive presets that use automatic masking. These presets detect and adjust specific areas such as the sky, the main subject, or the background. An adaptive preset might darken the sky, warm the subject, and darken the background, adapting to whatever image you apply it to. Building one takes more thought about which adjustment goes on which mask, but the results carry across very different photos.
Updating and Evolving Presets
Your editing style will change over time, and your presets should change with it. Edit a photo using your current approach, then right-click the existing preset and choose “Update with Current Settings.” Select the settings to include (using the same judgment as when you created it), and the preset now holds the new values. The old version is replaced.
If you want to keep the old version, save the new one under a numbered name instead. “Clean Portrait Base v2” tells you it is the second version, and when you make v3 you can delete v2 with confidence.
Presets and Consistency Across a Project
One of the most valuable uses of presets is keeping a body of work visually consistent. A portrait session, a wedding album, a travel series, or a portfolio page all benefit from a cohesive look where the images feel like they belong together.
Without presets, keeping that consistency across dozens or hundreds of images is tedious and error-prone. With a well-designed base preset, every image starts from the same foundation, and your manual work goes into matching exposure and image-specific fixes rather than recreating a look from scratch each time.
Many photographers create project-specific presets. Before a wedding, they might create a preset that defines the color palette and tonal style for that event. Before a landscape trip, they might refine a preset for the conditions they expect. Editing thousands of images afterward goes smoothly because the creative foundation is already set.
Common Mistakes
Treating presets as a finished edit. Applying a preset and doing nothing else is like buying a suit off the rack without having it tailored. It might look fine, but it will not look great. White balance, exposure, and local adjustments all need attention for the specific image.
Collecting hundreds of presets you never use. Downloading every free preset pack you find creates a cluttered, overwhelming Presets panel. A smaller library of presets you know well is far more efficient than a huge collection you have to scroll through and test every time.
Including too many settings in a preset. The most common creation mistake is ticking every box in the settings list. Your preset then overrides exposure, white balance, and other image-specific settings, forcing you to readjust them for every photo. Include only the settings that represent your consistent creative choices.
Using presets designed for a different genre. A preset designed for bright, airy wedding photography will not suit moody landscape images. A gritty street preset will not flatter portrait skin tones. Match the preset to the genre and conditions of your images.
Not testing on varied images. When creating a preset, test it on at least 10 different photos before relying on it: overexposed and underexposed, warm light and cool light, high-contrast and low-contrast scenes. A preset that only works on one kind of image is too fragile to be useful.
Forgetting to back up presets. Custom presets represent real creative work. If your computer fails and you have not backed up your preset folder, that work is gone.
Expecting presets to fix fundamental problems. No preset can save a badly exposed, out-of-focus, or poorly composed image. Presets work best on technically sound images that need a creative direction. Understanding the exposure triangle and composition will always matter more than any preset.
Try This: Preset Building Exercises
Exercise 1: Your First Base Preset. Edit five different photos from a recent shoot to a consistent look that you love. Identify which settings are the same across all five (this is your preset) and which differ (leave these out). Save the consistent settings as a preset. Apply it to 10 more photos and see how well it works as a starting point. Refine as needed.
Exercise 2: The Partial Preset Stack. Create three small presets: one that only affects the Tone Curve, one that only affects HSL, and one that only affects Color Grading. Apply them in different combinations to see how they interact.
Exercise 3: Reverse-Engineer a Look. Find a photograph whose editing style you admire. Using only Lightroom’s Develop tools, try to recreate the look on one of your own photos. Once you get close, save it as a preset. The goal is not to copy the style permanently but to learn from the process.
Exercise 4: The B&W Challenge. Create three distinctly different black-and-white presets: one high-contrast and dramatic, one soft and low-contrast, and one with a classic film look of visible grain and lifted shadows. Apply all three to the same color image and compare.
Exercise 5: The Preset Audit. Go through every preset in your library, both your own and downloaded ones. Apply each to a test image and judge it honestly. Delete any preset you have not used in the last three months or that produces results you do not like. Organize the rest into logical groups with clear names.
FAQ
How do I use presets in Lightroom?
Open a photo in the Develop module and click a preset in the Presets panel on the left. Hover first to preview it, use the Amount slider to set its strength, then adjust white balance and exposure for the photo. To apply a preset to many photos, select them in the Library grid and pick the preset from Quick Develop’s Saved Preset menu.
How do I create a preset in Lightroom?
Edit a photo, click the + at the top of the Presets panel and choose Create Preset. Tick only the settings you want the preset to change, give it a clear name, pick a group, and click Create.
Do presets work the same on every photo?
No. A preset applies the same settings, but those settings interact differently with different images depending on the original exposure, lighting, color palette, and white balance. A preset that suits a golden-hour landscape might make an overcast forest scene look wrong. That is why refining after applying a preset is always necessary.
Are paid presets worth it?
It depends on the presets and your needs. Some are carefully made and offer genuinely useful starting points. Others are basic adjustments you could make yourself in five minutes. Look at sample images edited with them, consider whether the style matches the photography you do, and try free presets first to learn what you like.
Can I use the same presets in Lightroom Classic and Lightroom (cloud version)?
Yes. Both versions use the same .xmp preset format and the same editing engine. A preset created in Lightroom Classic can be imported into the cloud version and the other way around. Older .lrtemplate files are converted to .xmp automatically when you import them.
How many presets should I have?
There is no right number, but many working photographers use somewhere between 10 and 30 regularly. If you find yourself scrolling endlessly to find the right one, you have too many. If you keep recreating the same adjustments from scratch because no preset matches, make more.
Can presets be applied to video in Lightroom?
Yes, with limits. The cloud-based Lightroom can apply presets to video clips and edit them with most of the Edit panel. Lightroom Classic can apply a preset to a video clip only through Quick Develop in the Library module, and only some settings carry over. For serious video color work, a dedicated video editor is still the better tool.
Will presets keep working in future Lightroom versions?
Lightroom has a long record of backward compatibility with presets. Presets from older versions continue to work in newer ones, converted to the current format automatically when needed. Presets built on basic tools like the tone curve, HSL, and Basic panel are the most stable. Presets that rely on newer features, like adaptive masks, only work in versions that have those features.
Presets and Learning to Edit
Presets are not a way around learning to edit. They become more useful as your editing knowledge grows. Using presets shows you what different slider combinations look like and helps you form preferences; later they keep your work consistent and speed up batch editing; eventually you build presets that encode your own style and change with it.
Invest time in both. Learn the fundamentals of photo editing: what the histogram tells you, how the tone curve works, and how to judge color. At the same time, build and refine your preset library. Understanding the underlying tools makes you a better preset maker, and using presets shows you editing combinations you might not have tried otherwise.
Editing on a phone? The mobile presets guide covers DNG preset files, cross-app limits, and judging a look on a small screen.