Get your FREE Photography Guide

A guide to "Capturing Motion" in low light situations

Adobe Lightroom Presets How To

Ever wondered how to use Adobe Lightroom Presets? Wonder no more! In this video I cover how to use them, preview, creation of a new preset, importing and exporting presets. I personally don’t use them a lot but they definitely have their place in Lightroom. Most of the time I prefer to give each image its own personality but they can be a great time saver or a good starting point for a new work of photographic art!

We can apply them to everything in Lightroom (I think) except for cropping. This is a bummer, especially if you are at a photo shoot, working tethered and want all photos to be cropped the same. I’ve requested this feature a few times in the LR forums to no avail. When creating a new one check the box to apply the setting when adding the preset, uncheck to keep it from applying. Importing and Exporting is as easy as right clicking the preset panel, then choose import or right click a preset and choose export. Other ideas for using presets would be product photography (batch editing), contrast, sharpening; the ideas are endless. Make some presets, try them out and then tweak them as you need to.

As promised there is a bonus Lightroom tip (direct from the Lightroom 3.3 Release Notes) to help Windows users speed up their Lightroom catalogs. Don’t forget to download your copy of the preset I created during the video!

Long Exposure Dock Adobe Lightroom Preset