How to Create Adobe Lightroom Presets

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In this photography tutorial, I cover how to create your own Presets within Adobe Lightroom. Using presets is a great way of being able to speed up your editing process, especially if you find yourself using similar settings again and again. Making your own presets to save your own editing options, is quite straight forward and this tutorial will teach you how. If you prefer, you can download pre-made presets. Make sure to check out my Adobe Lightroom Presets.

Open Adobe Lightroom and select the Develop Tab
Select a photograph you have already edited, or edit one
On the left-hand side, you should have a panel with options like “Navigator” and “Presets”. If the panel is hidden, click the little arrow to open it.
Under the Presets option, click on the + symbol as shown in the screenshot below:
This will open a box containing a selection of options. Enter a name for your preset, and then select a folder you want it saved within. This folder will be used to organise your presets under the “Presets” list in Adobe Lightroom, so make sure it makes sense and easy to find them later on. I use my folders group presets by type, e.g. all my Food Photography Presets are in the same folder.
Select which settings you want to be saved with this preset. By default most but “Graduated FIlters” and “Radial Filters” are automatically selected, and for most presets the default options are fine. If you're unfamiliar with any of the options available, I recommend just leaving it selected.
Click “Create” and taadaa, your preset is now created and can now be accessed under the Presets section.
To use the preset, select the photo you wish to use it on, locate it within your list of Presets and click on it. You might need to make some adjustments to the settings, but Presets are a great way of speeding up the editing process.
If you wish to just view what the Preset looks like before applying it, you can hover over the Preset in the list and the navigator will change to show you a preview.
If you wish to access your Presets folder, you can locate it by going onto the Edit menu at the top, select Preferences. Then click on the Presets tab and click “Show Lightroom Presets Folder”.