What Are Lightroom Presets?

First of all, if you are new in the world of photography you may be wondering

"What in the heck is Lightroom?".

Well, there’s no need to panic! The answer is simple. You may have heard about Photoshop. Lightroom and Photoshop are made by the same company: Adobe. The difference is the usage. Photoshop is used more commonly for very detail photo editing, or even creating illustrations in graphic design. On the other hand, Lightroom is a pure photo editing software. With Lightroom, you can do every adjustment that you usually would do with Photoshop's Camera RAW, with some other tweaks.

If you are an enthusiast photographer, or you do photography for a living, you may have encountered with that situation when you took thousands and thousands of photos, and you need to edit them all. That would take A LOT of time, right? This is where Lightroom's presets come to the rescue. A preset is just a way to save all the adjustments you have made to a photo. You can adjust all the sliders in the 'Develop' section (Basic, Tone Curve, HSL, Split Toning, Detail, Lens Correction, and so on), and save that configuration.

presetsce lightroom develop mode

It comes handy when as I mentioned before, you have thousands of photos to edit, but then you realize most of them have the same exposure or white balance.

This tool could save you A LOT of time while editing photos. Many photographers have developed their own workflow with Lightroom. Presets are so important because you can create an infinite number of them. Always is good to have variety, that's why you can create (or even download) many presets to your Lightroom library, so you can try one or another and see which fits you better in your photo.

It all sounds good, right? But, how do you create a Lightroom preset?

The first thing you have to do is to edit the photo with the adjustments you prefer. Once you have edited your photo, you have to save those settings to use them in the future.
Then you have to click in the upper menu, 'Develop' and then the 'new preset' option.
Now you should give a name to a preset and select the folder where you want to save it. In this window, you can also select which adjustments you want to apply. For example, let's suppose you want to save only the White Balance and the Basic Tone adjustment, then you check those boxes.
It's a good idea to create different folders for every preset you are making. That way, you can have categories such as BW, night mode, vintage, etc.
You are ready! You have created your first preset!

How to apply your new presets?

This is an easy question. In Lightroom, you will see Navigator, Presets, Snapshots, History, and Collections on the side menus. If you open the Presets menu, you will see all the presets that come by default with Lightroom, but also you will have all the presets you have created or downloaded.

presetsce applying a preset

Lightroom also allows you to make previews of the preset you are going to apply, so you can check if it is right for your photo. You only need to hover the mouse over the preset you want to use, and it will show you a preview of the adjustments you have saved with this preset.

So, now that you have learned how to create Lightroom's presets, go ahead and have some fun editing photos and share with us the results!