Blair Academy Photography
Lightroom Tutorial - Editing with Presets
By: Lydia Richardson ‘20 - Check out my portfolio here!
With photography, shooting with thoughtful composition can certainly make a great photo, but taking it one step further through editing can turn a great photo into a spectacular one. Making basic adjustments such as exposure, contrast, and leveling the shadows and highlights can sometimes make a difference, but where the strength of a good photo really lies is within the tones and balance of colours. Presets are the best tool designed to help you do just that.
A preset is a filter or a predetermined balance of levels and colours that you can apply to any photo that you edit in lightroom. After applying a preset, you can change its adjustments to your liking until your photo has the look you want. Presets can be bought or downloaded from online, or if you’ve edited a photo in a way you like, you can save it as a custom preset and use it countless times again. Here under the navigation menu in Lightroom is where you can find presets.
Applying Lightroom Presets
To apply your presets to your photos, whether you purchased them or created them yourself, all you have to do is select them from your new best friend: the drop down Presets bar found in the navigation menu. To see how a preset looks on your photo before applying it, hover your mouse over the desired preset and Lightroom will show you a preview of what it would look like if you selected it. You can scroll over all of your presets before choosing which one you like best.
Here are some examples of before/after of photos using lightroom presets. These were all edited using Jessica Whitaker presets.
Creating a Lightroom Preset
You know about the copy and paste feature on Lightroom, but did you know that you can save your editing preferences as presets and apply them to photos during any future lightroom editing session? Creating your own presets is a great way to keep a theme or continual editing style to connect your work and saves you time when editing photos. Like with any other preset, you can adjust the levels to your liking after applying it so it works on any one of your photos.
To make your own preset, first edit a photo in Lightroom using the editing and adjustment tools. Once you have it where you like, go to the “Presets” bar in the navigator menu and press the plus. Select “Create Preset” and Lightroom will save your adjustments under whichever name you choose and put it into your user presets which are accessible to apply from the presets bar.
Using Pre-made Presets
Presets made by other photographers and editors are available everywhere online. Some you may download for free, but others you have to pay for. The best presets typically aren’t free but can be a good investment to make as they usually come in larger packs with more variety. Online companies sell huge preset packs for both photoshop and lightroom.
Here are some places where you can download free presets:
Here are some places you can buy great presets:
A lot of photographers sell their own presets, so check for all of your favourites!
Importing Downloaded Presets to Lightroom
Once you have downloaded a set of presets, open up lightroom and pull up a photo in the develop tab. On one side of your screen, there should be a drop down navigation bar with a tab labelled “Presets” that you can open. Press the little plus button on this bar and select “import”. Find the folder of presets that you’d like to import and select them to upload. After they’ve downloaded into lightroom, you can select “manage presets” from the same plus button menu. This is how you can organise your presets so that they are ordered and titled as you like.
