How to Create Lightroom Presets: A Complete Guide

Adobe Lightroom presets are one of the most powerful time-saving tools in a photographer's workflow. Whether you're editing portraits, landscapes, or product shots, presets let you apply a consistent look across dozens of images in seconds. Creating your own — rather than relying on downloaded packs — gives you edits that are genuinely tailored to your camera, your lighting conditions, and your visual style.

Here's exactly how it works, and what determines whether a preset will actually hold up across your shoots.

What Is a Lightroom Preset, Exactly?

A preset is a saved collection of Develop module adjustments — things like exposure, contrast, white balance, tone curves, HSL (Hue/Saturation/Luminance) sliders, grain, sharpening, and color grading. When you apply a preset to a new image, Lightroom reads those saved values and applies them all at once.

Presets don't permanently alter your original files. Lightroom is non-destructive by default, meaning the preset is just a set of instructions layered on top of your raw data. You can remove or modify it at any time.

Presets are stored as .xmp files (in Lightroom Classic) or synced through Adobe's cloud (in Lightroom desktop and mobile). The format has evolved over Lightroom versions, which matters if you're sharing presets with others using different software builds.

How to Create a Preset in Lightroom Classic 🎨

The process in Lightroom Classic (the desktop-focused version) is straightforward:

1. Import a photo and open it in the Develop module.
2. Make your adjustments — exposure, color grading, tone curve, detail settings, whatever you want saved.
3. In the Presets panel on the left, click the "+" icon and select "Create Preset."
4. Name your preset and choose a folder to organize it.
5. Select which settings to include using the checkboxes — this step is critical.

That last step is where most beginners make mistakes. If you include white balance in the preset, it will force that exact color temperature onto every image you apply it to — even photos shot in different lighting conditions. For most presets, it's better to leave white balance unchecked and let each image keep its own.

Similarly, think carefully about whether to include exposure adjustments. A preset built on a well-exposed image may overexpose or underexpose photos with different base exposures. Many photographers save presets with exposure set to 0, then fine-tune per image.

How to Create a Preset in Lightroom (Desktop/Cloud Version)

The cloud-synced version of Lightroom (sometimes called Lightroom CC) follows a similar logic:

1. Open a photo in the Edit panel.
2. Apply your adjustments.
3. Click the three-dot menu at the top of the Edit panel.
4. Select "Create Preset."
5. Name it, assign it to a group, and choose which adjustment categories to save.

Presets created here sync across devices — including Lightroom Mobile — as long as you're signed into the same Adobe account. This is useful if you edit on both desktop and tablet, but it also means your preset library lives in the cloud rather than as local files you can easily back up manually.

Which Adjustments Actually Make a Good Preset?

Not all sliders are equally portable across images. Here's a general breakdown:

Building Presets That Actually Hold Up 🔧

A common frustration is creating a preset that looks great on one image but breaks on others. A few practices help:

Start from a neutral base. Build your preset from an image that's already properly exposed and white-balanced. Compensating for a problem exposure during preset creation bakes that compensation into every future application.

Create variations. Many photographers build a preset "family" — a base version plus slight variants for overcast light, golden hour, and indoor shooting. These can share most settings while adjusting temperature, tint, or exposure.

Test on diverse images. Apply your preset to a wide range of photos from your library — different subjects, lighting conditions, and ISOs — before finalizing it. This reveals which settings are causing problems across different scenarios.

Use partial presets. You don't need one preset to do everything. Some photographers keep a separate "skin tone" preset, a "grain and texture" preset, and a "color grade" preset that they stack in sequence.

How Lightroom Version and Workflow Affect Your Results

The preset-building process differs meaningfully depending on whether you use Lightroom Classic, Lightroom desktop, or Lightroom Mobile, and whether you're primarily editing raw files, JPEGs, or phone photos.

Raw files give presets more latitude — there's more underlying data for tone curve and color adjustments to work with. JPEGs have less, which can cause certain presets to produce clipped highlights or crushed shadows that wouldn't appear on raw originals.

Camera profiles also play a role. A preset built on files from one camera model may look noticeably different when applied to files from another, even at the same settings, because camera color profiles (Adobe Standard, Camera Faithful, etc.) interpret raw data differently. If you shoot with multiple bodies or share presets with others, this is worth testing carefully.

What the right preset structure looks like in practice depends on what you're shooting, how consistent your lighting is, which Lightroom version anchors your workflow, and whether you're editing your own files exclusively or sharing tools across a team or client base.