Lightroom Editing

Why Your Lightroom Presets Look Nothing Like the Preview (And How to Fix That)
Lightroom Editing

Why Your Lightroom Presets Look Nothing Like the Preview (And How to Fix That)

I once spent an entire weekend building a preset pack from scratch. Forty-seven presets, named after Fleetwood Mac songs, each one tuned to a specific mood and light condition. I put them up for free download on a Monday morning, went to make coffee, and came back to 3,000 downloads. By Friday it was 50,000. The emails started almost immediately, and about half of them said the same thing: “These look nothing like your screenshots.

Lightroom Presets Are Not Magic Buttons (But Here's How to Make Them Feel Like It)
Lightroom Editing

Lightroom Presets Are Not Magic Buttons (But Here's How to Make Them Feel Like It)

A few years back, I released a preset pack on a Tuesday night mostly because I couldn’t sleep. I’d spent the better part of a weekend building it, named every preset after a Wilco song, and figured maybe a hundred people would download it. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. By the following Monday, my inbox was a disaster of people saying the presets “didn’t work” on their photos. That week taught me more about Lightroom presets than the previous three years of using them.

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)
Lightroom Editing

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)

A few years ago I released a preset pack on a Tuesday night, mostly because I’d spent the entire weekend building it and felt too stubborn to let it sit on my hard drive. I named every preset after a song, priced the pack at zero dollars, and went to bed. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. The number wasn’t the surprising part. The surprising part was how many people emailed me to say the presets “weren’t working” because their photos looked nothing like the preview images on the download page.