How to Create Lightroom Presets

How to Create Lightroom Presets

A preset is just an edit you saved. Once you have one, a look you spent ten minutes building becomes a single click you can apply to a photo, a shoot, or every image in a catalog — and because Lightroom stores it as a small file, you can move it between computers, hand it to someone else, or sell it.

This walkthrough builds one from scratch in Lightroom Classic: a warm, low-contrast look made with the Color Grading wheels, saved as a user preset, applied across a batch with Sync Settings, then exported so it can travel. The most important part is not the look — it is a single button in the save dialog that decides whether your preset plays nicely with other photos or quietly wrecks them.

Getting Started

Everything happens in the Develop module. The edit itself is deliberately restrained, and that restraint is the point — you are building something you will reuse, not finishing one photo.

1. Open an Image in Develop

   Double-click your photo and switch to the Develop module. All the sliders you need are down the right-hand side. If the module is new to you, editing photos in Lightroom Classic covers the basics.

2. Pull the Contrast Down

   In the Basic panel, reduce contrast slightly. This is the foundation of a faded look, and going gently here leaves room for the color work to show.

3. Lower Highlights, Lift Shadows

   Bring the highlights down and the shadows up. The tonal range compresses, the image softens, and you get the flatter base that film-style looks are built on.

Building the Look With Color Grading

Color Grading is where a preset earns its personality. It sits near the bottom of the right-hand panel and gives you three wheels — shadows, midtones and highlights — each able to push color into that part of the tonal range independently.

4. Warm the Midtones

   Click in the centre of the midtones wheel and drag outward. The direction sets the hue, the distance sets how much. Dragging toward the warm side gives you the sunlit, golden cast that suits an outdoor or beach image.

5. Cool the Shadows

   On the shadows wheel, drag toward the blues. Warm midtones against cool shadows is the split that makes a grade read as deliberate rather than as a color cast — it is the oldest trick in color work and it still does the heavy lifting.

6. Refine With Balance, Saturation and Hue

   Each wheel has a saturation slider for strength and a hue control at its edge for fine-tuning the exact color. The Balance slider underneath shifts weight between the shadow and highlight grades, so you can decide which end of the range dominates. Toggle the backslash key at any point to compare against the original. The Color Grading tool has more depth than it first appears, and PHLEARN PRO members can go further in How to Use Color Grading Presets in Adobe Camera Raw.

Keep the Edit Gentle

It is worth resisting the urge to push this hard. A preset is applied to photos you have not seen yet, shot in light you did not plan for, and a heavy edit that flatters one image will break the next. A restrained starting point survives that; an aggressive one has to be undone every time. If you want a stronger look on a particular photo, apply the preset and then push further on that image alone.

Saving It as a Preset

Presets live in the left-hand panel of the Develop module, alongside Snapshots, History and Collections. Anything you make goes into User Presets, kept separate from the sets Lightroom ships with.

7. Open the Presets Panel

   On the left, expand Presets. You will see your favorites at the top, then User Presets, then Lightroom’s built-in collections underneath.

8. Create a New Preset

   Click the plus icon at the top of the panel and choose Create Preset. The New Develop Preset dialog opens with every adjustable setting listed as a checkbox.

9. Name It and Choose a Group

   Give it a name and leave the group set to User Presets, or make a new group if you are building a family of looks that belong together.

Name It for What It Does

Descriptive names beat evocative ones. “Summer Day” tells you nothing six months later; “Warm Low Contrast” tells you exactly what will happen when you click it. Once you have twenty presets in the panel, the difference between naming conventions is the difference between a library you use and a list you scroll past.

The Setting That Makes or Breaks a Preset

By default the save dialog has a great many boxes ticked, and most people click Create without looking. That is the single biggest mistake in preset building, because every ticked box is a setting your preset will impose on any photo you apply it to — including settings you never touched.

10. Click Check None

    At the bottom of the dialog, click Check None to clear every box. Start from nothing rather than from everything.

11. Tick Only What You Actually Changed

    Go back and select just the adjustments you made — here that is contrast, highlights, shadows and color grading. Then click Create.

Why This Matters More Than the Look

Say you leave exposure ticked because it was on by default. Apply that preset to a photo you already exposed correctly and your careful exposure is overwritten by whatever the original image happened to need. The same goes for white balance, cropping, lens corrections and everything else in that dialog. A preset that only carries the four settings you deliberately changed lays your look over existing work instead of replacing it — which means you can stack it on top of per-image adjustments and keep both.

Applying It to Other Photos

With the preset saved, using it is trivial — and this is the moment the time you spent starts paying itself back.

12. Pick Another Image

    Press G for the Library grid view and select a different photo, then return to the Develop module.

13. Click the Preset

    Find it under User Presets and click once. The whole look applies instantly, and because you were disciplined about the checkboxes, nothing else about the image changes.

Syncing a Whole Batch

Clicking a preset once per photo is fine for a handful. For a full shoot, Sync Settings copies your adjustments across every selected image in one move.

14. Select Your Reference Image First

    Click the photo you have already edited — the one you want everything else to match. Lightroom syncs from the most-selected image, so this order matters.

15. Add the Rest

    Hold Shift to extend the selection across a run of photos, or Cmd on Mac (Ctrl on PC) to pick them individually.

16. Sync the Settings You Want

    Click Sync Settings at the bottom right. The dialog is the same checkbox grid as before, so tick contrast, highlights, shadows and color grading, then click Synchronize. Every selected image takes the look at once. There is more on this in how to sync settings in Lightroom and batch editing in Lightroom Classic.

Exporting, Sharing and Importing Presets

A preset stays inside your catalog until you export it. Exporting turns it into a file you can back up, move to another machine, send to a colleague, or package up and sell.

17. Export the Preset

    Right-click the preset in the Presets panel and choose Export. Pick a location, give the file a name and save. That file is the preset — nothing else is needed to reproduce the look elsewhere.

18. Import One In

    To bring a preset into Lightroom, go to File > Import Develop Profiles and Presets, select the file and click Import. It appears under User Presets ready to use.

19. Try It With a Ready-Made Pack

    If you would rather start from something finished and reverse-engineer it, the How to Create Lightroom Presets installs the same way. So do the beach presets, the film vibes presets and the airy wedding presets — open one, look at which settings it carries, and you learn a lot about how other people build them.

Where Presets Usually Go Wrong

Almost every disappointing preset comes down to one of three things. The first is saving every checkbox, so the preset overwrites work it was never meant to touch. The second is building the look on an unusual photo — something badly exposed or lit oddly — which produces a preset that only ever suits that one file. The third is syncing from the wrong image, because Sync Settings copies from the most-selected photo, not from the first one you clicked.

A Preset Is a Starting Point

Even a well-built preset will not land perfectly on every frame, and it is not supposed to. Exposure varies between shots, skin tones react differently to a color grade, and a look tuned on a bright outdoor image will need easing back indoors. Apply it, then adjust that photo — the preset has still saved you the ten minutes of building the grade from nothing. PRO members can see how this fits a full pipeline in How to Edit in Photoshop from Lightroom Classic.

More Free Lightroom Tutorials

These free tutorials build on the panels used here and are worth knowing if you spend time in Lightroom Classic.

• How to Edit Photos in Lightroom Classic: The Develop Module
• The Color Grading Wheels in Lightroom Classic – Day 9
• New AI Assisted Culling Feature in Lightroom

What Makes a Preset Worth Reusing

The value of a preset is not that it saves clicks. It is that it makes a set of photos look like a set. A gallery edited image by image drifts — slightly warmer here, a little more contrast there — and the drift is visible the moment the photos sit side by side. One preset applied across the whole take removes that variation before anyone notices it was possible.

The second thing it buys you is a record. A preset is a written description of a look, in the only language that matters: the exact settings that produce it. Six months on you will not remember how far you pushed the midtones, but the preset does, and you can open it, read the values back and build a variation from there rather than starting over.

Build a Small Library You Actually Use

Two or three presets you reach for constantly are worth more than fifty you scroll past. Start with the look you already apply most often without thinking about it, build it carefully, save only the settings you changed, and give it a name that says what it does.

Then let it grow from real work. Every time you finish an edit and think you would happily use this again, that is a preset. Save it while the settings are still in front of you, keep the naming honest, and within a few months you will have a small, personal set of looks that fits how you actually shoot — which is worth considerably more than any pack you could buy.