Turn Your Favorite Looks Into Lightroom Presets

Turn Your Favorite Looks Into Lightroom Presets

Building a Lightroom preset that actually works across many different photos comes down to three habits: leaving certain sliders out entirely, protecting skin tones with the tone curve, and keeping every adjustment subtle. Follow those three rules and even a simple, low-contrast split-tone look can become a preset that holds up on photo after photo.

Getting Started: Testing Across Multiple Photos

A preset that looks great on one photo but falls apart on another isn’t finished yet, so the process starts with more than a single test image.

1. Work with at Least Two Different Photos

   Open the Develop module on a photo with a noticeably different background or lighting situation than whatever photo you’ll test the preset on next. Building and checking a preset across visually different images from the start catches problems that a single photo would hide.

Rule One: Leave Out White Balance and Exposure

The single most important rule for a reusable preset is knowing which sliders not to touch.

2. Never Include Color Temperature or Exposure

   A preset should assume the photo it’s applied to is already reasonably well exposed with correct white balance. Baking in a specific exposure or temperature adjustment might look fine on the photo it was built on, but it can push an already-dark photo into being badly underexposed, or shift the color balance of a photo that didn’t need correcting in the first place.

Why This Matters More Than Any Other Setting

Exposure and white balance are the two settings most dependent on how a specific photo was actually shot — lighting conditions, camera settings, and time of day all vary from photo to photo in ways a stylistic preset simply can’t predict or correct for reliably.

Rule Two: Protect Skin Tones in the Tone Curve

Split-toning a photo through the Tone Curve’s individual color channels is powerful, but it’s easy to accidentally push skin tones somewhere unflattering if the highlight and shadow colors aren’t chosen carefully.

3. Avoid Cool Highlights

   In the Tone Curve panel, avoid pulling the green or blue channels up in the highlight range. Because skin tones generally sit in the lighter part of the tonal range, a cool green or blue highlight tint tends to make skin look sickly or off-color rather than stylish.

4. Keep Highlights Warm and Shadows Cool

   Pull a small amount of red up and blue down in the highlights to warm them slightly, which flatters skin tones across a wide range of photos. Shadows have much more flexibility — a cool, slightly blue-green shadow tone works well as a complementary contrast to warm highlights.

Rule Three: Keep Every Adjustment Subtle

The strongest presets tend to be built from small, restrained moves rather than dramatic ones.

5. Make Small, Deliberate Adjustments

   Bring Contrast down and bring Highlights down to recover highlight detail (Aaron calls those two pretty strong adjustments), then lift Shadows a touch and add small amounts of Texture, Clarity and Vibrance. Nothing else needs to be dramatic — the more subtle each adjustment is, the more photos the finished preset will work well on.

Saving the Preset with the Right Settings Checked

How a preset gets saved matters just as much as how it’s built — the wrong checkboxes can undo all three rules above in one step.

6. Create a New Preset and Name It Descriptively

   Click the plus icon in the Presets panel and choose Create Preset. In the Group menu, create a new group to keep your own presets together (Aaron names his PHLEARN Lightroom Presets). Then name the preset in a way that describes what it actually does — noting the contrast level and color direction, as in PHLEARN Low Contrast Film Blue Yellow — so it’s identifiable later without needing to reapply it just to remember what it looks like.

7. Click Check None, Then Check Only What You Changed

   Start by clicking Check None to clear every setting category, then check only Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, the Tone Curve, and Vibrance, Texture, and Clarity — whatever was actually adjusted while building the look. Keep Process Version checked too; Aaron notes it helps if someone is using a different version of Lightroom. Leave White Balance and Exposure unchecked, consistent with the first rule.

Why the Checkbox Step Is Easy to Get Wrong

Lightroom checks several boxes by default when a new preset is created, including White Balance and Exposure — the exact two settings the first rule says to leave out. Clicking Check None first, then deliberately re-checking only what was actually adjusted, avoids accidentally baking in a setting that was never meant to be part of the preset.

Testing the Preset on a Second Photo

The real proof of a well-built preset is how it performs on a completely different image, which is exactly why testing on more than one photo from the start matters.

8. Apply the Preset to the Second Image

   Press G for the grid view, select the other test photo, press D for the Develop module and click the new preset once in the Presets panel. Because exposure and white balance were deliberately excluded, the preset’s contrast, tone curve, and vibrance adjustments should carry over cleanly.

9. Make Any Remaining Per-Photo Adjustments Separately

   If the second photo still needs a small white balance tweak, make that adjustment manually and separately from the preset — exactly the kind of per-photo correction the preset was designed to leave out.

A Good Preset Is a Starting Point, Not a Final Answer

Seeing a preset hold up well on a second, visually different photo — needing only a minor white balance nudge rather than a full re-edit — is the real sign it was built correctly, following all three rules rather than just looking good on the one photo it was designed around.

Why This Approach Works

These three rules all solve the same underlying problem: a preset has no way to know anything about the specific photo it’s about to be applied to, so it needs to avoid making assumptions that only hold true for the photo it was built on. Excluding exposure and white balance removes the two settings most tied to how an individual photo was shot; protecting skin tones with warm highlights keeps portraits looking natural regardless of the subject; and keeping adjustments subtle means even an imperfect match to a new photo still looks intentional rather than broken. If a preset built this way already feels like a strong starting point, exploring a curated pack — whether that’s old-school film looks, oceanside vibes, or perfect colors for life’s most important memories — shows how the same underlying rules scale into a full, professionally built preset library.

Final Thoughts

A well-built preset isn’t meant to be the final word on an edit — it’s meant to be a strong, reliable starting point that still leaves room for a quick per-photo tweak to white balance or exposure afterward. That combination, a preset that gets 90% of the way there plus a small manual correction, tends to produce better and more consistent results across a whole shoot than either one alone. For anyone who wants to try this exact workflow on a real set of sample images before building one from scratch, phlearn.com offers a free sample pack to practice with.

Quick Reference: Keys, Menus and Settings

• Delete a curve pointRight-click the control point on the Tone Curve
• Basic panelContrast down, Highlights down, Shadows up; Texture, Clarity and Vibrance up a little
• Tone CurveBlue: shadows up, highlights down; Green: shadows up, highlights down; Red: highlights up a tiny bit
• Save the presetPresets panel plus icon > Create Preset; Group: create a new group
• Pick the settingsCheck None, then only what you changed, plus Process Version; leave White Balance and Exposure out
• Test on another photoG for the grid view, select the photo, D for Develop, click the preset
• Per-photo fixesTemp, Tint and Exposure by hand, never in the preset

No values to copy: every move is a little bit, set by eye.