Why You Shouldn’t Use Lightroom Presets

There is an extremely popular trend in photography at the moment to buy the presets of your favorite photographers. Why I completely understand the appeal of this, there are a lot of issues with this trend as well.

What are presets? If you are unfamiliar with Lightroom presets, here is a quick explanation. Lightroom has the amazing ability to copy the editing choices made on one photo and paste these changes onto one or several photos. This is extremely helpful for when you editing large batches of photos. However, a preset is when you take these edits and save them in a file called a preset. You can then access this file at any time and apply it to any photo you open in Lightroom. So this is not a comparison of two photos to try to make them similar, this is a file with the saved values of specific edited elements of a photo.

People mainly buy presets from photographers because they want their personal photos to resemble their favorite photographer’s photos. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen with a preset. Because presets do not require a base image, applying a preset to any image is like editing blind. When the preset was created it was made in reference to a specific image. The only way for it to work properly is to be used with an extremely similar image. Any difference between the two images will change the way the preset effects the photo, such as the type of camera used, the settings on the camera, the location of the photo, the time of day, the photo subject, etc. Especially if you buying a preset from someone else you may never know the photo it was originally intended for and therefore would realistically, never get the preset to work optimally.

Don’t misunderstand me there is a time and place for presets, however, it is not how they are most often used. I use presets all the time in my personal editing, however, I keep the original images I used those edits for so I can compare the images and adjust the preset accordingly. I also only save a few basic edits in presets, like exposure, contrast, white balance, shadows, and highlights. This way I can apply them to photos with similar lighting to curate my style, then I go into each photo and do more photo-specific edits. This is how presets can be used to aid editing, they were never meant to completely replace editing.

Many people buy presets as a solution to their problem of being inexperienced editors. However, throwing a bad preset over a bad image doesn’t make it any better. Photographers believe their issues are in editing but in reality, most photographers are having issues on the shoot, in camera. It is flooring the number of people who proclaim to be a professional photographer that still use the auto setting on their camera. They have gone out and bought this gorgeous, expensive camera and are using it like any other point and shoot camera. Several photographers don’t know how to use their camera to get the right settings before going into editing. Learning how to use your camera in manual mode is crucial to getting the setting right before you even open Lightroom.

Don’t be fooled by photographers who say they can transform your photos with their powerful preset. You will be disappointed. Your money would be better spent investing in photography education courses to learn all your camera is actually capable of and how you can create almost perfect images in camera.

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