Photography Presets Guide: How to Use Presets and Still Have Your Own Style
Presets are a starting point, not a finish line. Here’s how to use them correctly, and how to develop a look that’s actually yours.
What Presets Actually Are
A preset is a saved set of Lightroom adjustments. That’s it. Every slider position, every color grade, every curve adjustment, saved into one click. It’s a starting point that can save you 20 minutes of basic adjustments on every image.
What a preset does not do: give you a style. It cannot give you a style. A style comes from the decisions you make about light, composition, posing, and a hundred small editorial choices that happen before you ever open Lightroom. A preset can reflect and reinforce a style you already have. It cannot create one.
Most photographers who buy presets and feel disappointed are disappointed because they were expecting the preset to do the work that only they can do. Once you understand the actual job of a preset, saving time and anchoring your color direction, you’ll use them far more effectively.
The 3 Types of Presets
Not all presets are the same tool. Here’s how to think about them:
- Technical presets: These fix exposure and white balance, purely functional. You’d use these on a shoot where lighting was inconsistent and you want a quick baseline across 500 images before you do anything creative.
- Aesthetic presets: These apply a specific color grade, film, matte, warm tones, desaturated editorial. They’re starting points for a visual direction. The risk is that everyone who buys the same preset pack is starting from the same place.
- AI presets: Generated by analyzing your best images, your actual output, your lighting preferences, your color tendencies. These adapt to how you shoot rather than forcing your images into a generic look. This is what I offer inside the photography course.
How to Apply Presets Without Losing Your Look
The single biggest mistake photographers make with presets is clicking and exporting. Here’s the workflow that actually works:
- Apply at 50-70% opacity to start. In Lightroom, you can reduce the opacity of a preset when you apply it. Starting at half-strength gives you the direction without the commitment. You can always push it further.
- Adjust white balance to match your specific lighting. Every preset is calibrated to a particular color temperature. If your shoot was in shade and the preset was designed for tungsten, the white balance will fight you. Fix this before anything else.
- Fine-tune skin tones. This is non-negotiable. Every client’s skin is different. Every lighting setup is different. A preset that makes one person’s skin look perfect will make another’s look orange or grey. Check your HSL orange channel every time.
Never just click and export. That’s how you get galleries that look like someone else’s work.
Sam’s Free AI Presets
The presets available inside the photography course work differently from standard presets. Rather than applying a fixed color grade, they analyze the lighting conditions in each specific image and adjust automatically. That means a preset applied to a golden-hour shot and a studio shot will produce two different results, both of them calibrated to look intentional rather than filtered.
They’re available free with the course. If you’re spending more than 10 minutes per image on basic adjustments, the presets will cut that time significantly while keeping your output consistent.
Building Your Own Preset
This is the exercise I recommend to every photographer who wants a genuine signature look:
- Pick 10 of your best images, images you love, images that feel most “you”
- Edit each one manually, from scratch, until you love the result
- Don’t use any presets during this process
- Look at the settings across all 10 images
- Average them
- Save that average as a new preset
That saved preset is your base preset. It captures your actual aesthetic, not a filter you bought, but the editing decisions you naturally make when you’re working without constraints. It will need adjustments on every image, but it gives you a starting point that’s genuinely yours.
Skin Presets vs. Gold Presets
Inside the course, I offer two distinct preset directions: Skin presets and Gold presets. The Skin presets prioritize clean, natural skin tones, reduced orange saturation, lifted luminance, minimal color grading, designed for portrait and fashion work where skin is the centerpiece. The Gold presets add warm, rich tones to highlights for a luxury editorial feel, better suited to brand shoots, product photography, and situations where you want the image to feel expensive rather than clean.
Most photographers end up using both, depending on the shoot. They’re not mutually exclusive. They’re tools for different situations.
When NOT to Use a Preset
Presets work best when the lighting is consistent and controlled. There are situations where a preset will slow you down rather than help:
- Heavy backlight: The dramatic exposure split means the preset’s calibration will fight the image. Manual adjustment is faster.
- Mixed lighting (indoor + window): Two different color temperatures in the same frame mean no single white balance setting will be right. You need to make intentional decisions about which source to prioritize, a preset can’t do that for you.
- Night photography: The extreme contrast range and artificial light sources make preset application unpredictable. Start from scratch.
In these situations, fighting a preset is slower than just editing from zero. Know when to skip the shortcut.
The Consistency Game
Here’s the real reason presets matter at the business level: consistent editing style equals instantly recognizable portfolio equals premium positioning.
Clients who hire at the top of the market hire based on what they expect, not what you’re capable of. They’ve seen your portfolio. They know what your images look like. They’re hiring you because they want that look applied to their project. If your editing style changes shoot to shoot, you’re removing the one thing that makes you predictable, and predictability at the high end of the market is a feature, not a flaw.
Build your preset, refine it over 3-6 months, and don’t touch it. The consistency compounds. After a year, your portfolio will look like it was shot by one person with a clear vision. That’s what books premium clients.
Ready to build that consistency? The photography course includes the free AI presets and the full editing workflow, start there.
Want to talk through your current editing workflow? Book a free strategy call.