Thaipusam Festival, Batu Caves, Malaysia.

One of the biggest advantages in working with Adobe Lightroom is the ability to use Develop Presets. These can be found on the left hand side of your screen in the Develop module. Lightroom ships with a handful of basic presets included, but you can easily make your own, or add ones that other people have created.

More than anything, Presets are a time saving device. With a single click, you can apply a number of adjustments to your RAW image. Once you become familiar with presets, you’ll probably have a sense of exactly which preset will work best. As you can see in the following screenshot, I have a lot of presets, organized into various categories, but there are probably only about 20 or 30 that I use on a regular basis.

Preset Panel

The settings that presets give are able to be edited. If you apply a preset and the result is close to what you have in mind but is not quite there, you can make extra adjustments to the various settings in order to finetune it. If you find yourself making the same fine tune settings each time, you can easily save the new settings as a preset, or update an existing preset. Simply right click on the preset name and choose update with current settings to update it, or the + sign at the top of the Presets panel to make a completely new one.

A simple Google search for Lightroom Presets can lead you to hundreds that you can download, some for free and others that you must pay for. A couple of my favorite and most used sources are X-Equals and Matt Kloskowski’s Lightroom Killer Tips. To add a downloaded preset into Lightroom, right click in the Presets panel, select Import and navigate to wherever you saved the preset.

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