How to Apply Presets in Lightroom

Hi, everyone!

Welcome to another exciting Lightroom blog post, dedicated to the most awesome, time-saving, and career-changing photo editors’ best friends: Presets!

I’ll explain and briefly compare Presets and Profiles, another cool Lightroom feature that helps you refine your photos in lightspeed, although limited when it comes to customization. I’ll also show you how to use presets in Lightroom, the type of presets you can explore, and how to manipulate preset settings to make your photo fully match your vision. Finally, we’ll learn how to install presets in Lightroom and how to save customized presets for future use.

As usual, this is based on one of the classes from my Lightroom Essentials course. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to the full Lightroom Essentials Course as well as my 30+ additional courses on  Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

Ready for some incredible photo editing magic?

Let 's do this!

What are Presets in Lightroom?

Presets are customizable filters that we can apply to photos in Lightroom to manipulate attributes like Light, Color, Effects, Details, and others. There are also Adaptive Presets that really streamline our workflow, but we’ll get there a few paragraphs down, so don’t go anywhere.

Presets are intuitive and dynamic and, opposed to Profiles, allow us to add effects to our photos while measuring in real time which attributes suffer any change – and this is a valuable feature for both students and experienced editors, believe me. Presets work great on RAW files and processed image files like JPEG.

RAW is not an acronym, it refers to unprocessed and uncompressed photographs taken by a digital camera. Shooting in RAW allows for highly detailed images and lossless quality, so we end up with large sized files but full of editing potential.

What are Profiles in Lightroom?

Profiles work best with RAW files, because a raw profile determines how the raw content of a photo is displayed on screen.

We won’t go too deep into these, but it’s useful to understand that Lightroom reads the RAW file and, based on this analysis and the option you choose, assigns a new profile (by default it’s Adobe Color) that sets updated color curves, fixed color grading, new contrast values, and other attributes, directly into the image.

Although Profiles have an amount slider you can manipulate to control the applied effect’s intensity, these do not affect adjustment sliders. We can’t immediately acknowledge what has been changed across the image’s attributes. And, in my opinion, this is the reason why I prefer Presets.

Quick guide: How to Apply Profiles in Lightroom

Let’s add a photo to Lightroom to begin editing. This particular one is a RAW file.

This image is part of the Lightroom Essentials Course Exercise Files, available for students to download. Sign up to BYOL to have immediate access to these resources! You can also use any other image you prefer to follow along, of course.

Let’s click on Edit from the toolbar to the right of your workspace. We can also use the shortcut key E on both Mac and PC.

As we can see below, the Adobe Color profile has been assigned by default to the photo. This default profile is, for most cases, a great one-click starting point for our image editing needs.

By clicking on the Profile dropdown menu, we can access some other default Adobe color profiles:

• Adobe Landscape – great for outdoor scenes and nature photography.

• Adobe Portrait – great for portrait photography, accurate on skin tones.

• Adobe Standard – a balanced solution for multiple photography styles.

• Adobe Vivid – powers up saturation and detail.

• Adobe Monochrome – great for black and white conversions.

We can also click on Browse All Profiles… to access a vast collection of profiles to rapidly edit our photos, individually or in bulk (we’ll get there, as well).

To apply a profile from a specific collection, we expand the category and click on one of the thumbnails. We can adjust the adjustment intensity using the Amount slider.

To quickly show you why, in my opinion, I prefer Presets, let’s click on Edit to open the Adjustments panel. As you can see below, we have picked the Vintage 07 profile but there is no indication across the sliders of what was changed from the original state.

To wrap up Profiles and move on to Presets, let’s see what happens if we add a JPEG file to Lightroom. If we click on the Profile dropdown menu, we can only access standard Color and Monochrome profiles because this photo has its own embedded profile.

How to Apply Presets in Lightroom

Alright, let’s look at Presets, now! We’ll be using the same photo, RAW file, no worries at all. Let’s begin by clicking Presets from the right toolbar – or hit the shortcut Shift + P on both Mac and PC.

First Presets awesome feature: as we open the Presets panel, Lightroom scans our photo, reads its attributes and automatically recommends a set of presets to assist us on our image editing process! How cool is that?

We can browse all the preset recommendations or use the available filter categories to narrow down our search. To apply a Preset all we need to do is click on one of the thumbnails.

Once a Preset is applied, let’s click the Edit button on the right toolbar to open the Edit panel and have a look at the different adjustment sliders for Light, Color, Effects, and others.

This is awesome stuff! With Presets, we can see the actual changes that a specific preset makes to our photo, helping us connect each of these attributes to the image we have in front of us. This is brilliant for beginners!

Free Presets in Lightroom

Let’s look at the Premium Presets, now. The word “Premium” may trick us at first, but Recommended and Presets are all free in Lightroom. Well, they’re included with the paid Suite, so they’re… kind of free.

What are the differences between Recommended and Premium Presets?

Recommended Presets

• are not available in Lightroom Classic.

• are usually created and shared by members of the Adobe Lightroom Community.

• have preview thumbnails that show how a Preset changes the image.

Premium Presets

• are available for both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.

• are mostly created by professional photographers or creators.

• are sorted by categories and sub-categories.

Let’s push on and click on Premium to view what options Lightroom has for us!

Let’s say we want to add really warm colors to our photo (red, yellow, orange, brown), make it a bit darker, add some depth and extra contrast for higher impact. Let’s browse the categories. Autumn makes me think of warm colors. Let’s click on Seasons: Autumn to open the drop-down and pick the first option: TM01. Wow! Look at what we’ve done with a single click!

How to Edit a Preset in Lightroom

It’s really easy to customize a Preset and it helps us dramatically transform a photo with just a couple of adjustments. We move on to the Edit panel, and start working down through the different attributes. There’s a lot of trial and error and moving up and down the ladder until we are happy with the outcome.

For the example below, after applying the TM01 preset, I’ve increased Exposure and Vibrance in Color. I went a bit more nuts in Effects, pushing up Clarity a few steps, lowered Dehaze to around -40 and inverted the Vignette effect from black to white (below 0 it’s black, above 0 it’s white).

It’s important to remember that good image editing is subtle and efficient, keeping the original photo’s attributes as close as possible to the original shot. Unless you want to go all artist on your work and, in that case, almost every rule can be broken. I’m overcooking many of these effects on purpose, it’s not the best practice!

How to Save a Preset in Lightroom

Can we save our customized Presets in Lightroom? Yes, of course we can! Let’s jump in and learn how to do it! We’ll be working on a sequence of photos that will display how Presets help us keep our work consistent and balanced.

I’m going to apply the Premium Vintage VN09 preset to the photo. Just to recap: hit the Shortcut Shift + P, inside the Presets panel click on Premium. Next, open the Vintage drop-down menu and click on VN09.

Add some personal retouches to this photo, until you are pleased with the result. We will later apply these settings to other photos in this sequence. I’ll leave you to your imagination and personal point-of-view. Push on when you are done!

Nice! Next, we move from the Edit panel to the Presets panel to save our settings. We click on the + button – or the three dots, and then on Create Preset…

Now we pick a name for our customized Preset, define the Presets Group in which it will be saved and, in the options below, check the settings that we want to save. We can add them all or some specific ones, always consider what your project needs before moving on. Click Save to close the Create Preset window and that’s it!

How to Apply a Saved Preset in Lightroom

This couldn’t be any quicker or easier! Let’s open a second photo from the sequence, hit the shortcut Shift + P to open the Presets panel, and click on Yours. Under User Presets, we’ll find the customized Preset we’ve saved in the previous step.

Click on the Preset’s name and…

Done! The second photo now has the same attributes we’ve set for the first with a single mouse-click! Cool, huh? Can we apply this customized preset to multiple photos at once?

Find out in the next chapter!

How to Apply in Bulk a Saved Preset in Lightroom

Now you must be asking “This can’t be quick and easy, Dan! Is it?”. Well, yes, it is!

We use the shortcut key G on both Mac and PC to switch our workspace to Photo Grid. Then, we select one of the photos we’ve just edited and:

• Right-click with the mouse over the photo and select Copy Edit Settings.

• or Hit Command + C on a Mac, Control + C on a PC.

• or Click on the Copy Edit Settings button on our workspace lower toolbar.

Next, we hold Command on a Mac or Control on a PC and click on the remaining photos in the sequence, one by one, and:

• Right-click with the mouse over the photo and select Paste Edit Settings.

• or Hit Command + V on a Mac, Control + V on a PC.

• or Click on the Paste Edit Settings button on our workspace lower toolbar.

Awesome! Now every photo in this sequence has the same Preset settings applied. Of course, we still may need to retouch them. They may have been taken at different times, under natural or artificial lighting, or in different locations, but it is clear that we’ve saved a lot of time creating a first base of consistency with a saved Preset.

AI-based Adaptive Presets in Lightroom

Artificial Intelligence is growing and transforming our interactions with Adobe tools. Lightroom is no exception. Inside the Premium Presets we can find the Adaptive Preset Styles. Adaptive Presets adjust specific areas of our photos using AI-based masking.

At the time I’m writing this post, there are four styles available:

• Portrait – adjusts masked areas of a face in a portrait photo.

• Sky – masks and changes the sky area of a photo

• Subject – affects a specific subject in a photo

• Blur Background – creates or enhances a depth-of-field effect in a photo

I’ll share three examples of how this incredible technology reads our photos, creates masks, and applies changes to our photos in a single click.

This is Adaptive Portrait’s Glamour Portrait, that gives a slightly dreamy and smooth appearance to a face.

And as we can see in the next image, if we open the Masks panel inside the Masking tool, Lightroom has created a group of new masks (Teeth, Lips, Iris and Pupil…) and applied a series of adjustments to different image attributes. Incredible!

Next, we have an example of the Dark Drama Adaptive Preset applied to this photo’s cloudy sky.

And finally, a cool example of an Adaptive Preset applied to enhance background blur,  bringing the subject into a rich full focus. Love this!

How to Install Presets in Lightroom

Quick and easy! To install Presets in Lightroom we go to the Menu Bar and choose File > Import Profiles & Presets. Next, we browse the folder where we’ve saved our new presets. Click on Import to finish.

Our imported Presets are stored under the Yours tab in the Presets panel, ready to be used in our photos. Excellent!

And there we have it!

Wow, this has been a ride! Presets are powerful tools, so exciting and full of endless possibilities. With the help from these amazing effects, photo editing has become one of the most fun jobs in the world! Now we know what Presets are, how we can apply them to our photos, adjust their attributes, save them as fully customized resources, and how to import them from online sources! Have a great time with Presets and Lightroom!

What 's Next?

Go further with Lightroom by joining BYOL. As a BYOL member, you will gain access to my Lightroom Essentials course as well as my 30+ additional courses on After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

See you in class! – Dan