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Presets 101: A Beginner's Guide to Using Presets for Photo Editing
In this video, I'll show you how to use presets to edit your photos. I'll cover what presets are, how to create them, and how to share them. I'll also show you how to tweak the look and take inspiration from the presets. Don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter to get my free presets!
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🔗 Photos https://loicbellemarealford.ca/photography/2023/03/chamonix-lyon-full-album/
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► CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
00:53 What are photo presets?
01:59 My gripe with photo presets!
02:31 Why I use photo presets?
03:34 Creating 3 photos presets
08:14 Editing photos quickly with presets!
13:50 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
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hello everyone I just completed reading some photos on my ski trip in Germany France and I want to share some photo editing tips while they're still fresh in my mind this is the first part of a free part series and this one is all about presets so what are presets why I have a grab in general with some presets how I use them to edit my photos faster and finally how you can get some of their presets for free then you share at the end of the video let's get started by Rolling the intro I want to be very clear that these techniques don't only apply to my MacBook Pro and Lightroom that I'm going to be using in this video they apply whether you're using your computer your phone your tablet or if you're using a completely different software like my favorite photo editing app polar photo editor let's start by talking about water photo preset so photo pieces are actually very simple so for example if I like the photo of this photo right here and I want to apply it to other photos I can come inside of the presets right here inside of Lightroom then I can go into little plus inside a preset panel and I can save it so I can put a name right here we're going to call it ski hill and we're going to save whatever we want inside of the photo so here usually I like saving whatever I modified on this photo and I'm just going to be careful to come inside of the light here and remove the exposure the reason I'm doing this is that the exposure is going to change on every single picture and applying so don't necessarily want to save that setting on other photos I'm going to apply the preset to afterwards then we can click here and we can have access to our preset right down here so that's how easy it is to save it preset afterwards you can can go inside of the options right here and you can share prices for other people so somebody hasn't come here and you can import a preset so again very simple and finally other people can share their presets to you so that's exactly what I'm going to do at the end of this video so stick around till the end if you want to learn how to get my presets for free that I use to edit all of the photos inside of the ski trip now this is my gripe with photo presets you might have gone online seen some pictures that you really like from the photographer go online pay to buy their presets then try applying them to your photos and realize wait they don't work out at all for your scenario this is because photo presets are not meant to be a one-click edit solution to all your photos they're actually just different ways of editing photos and a great way to get some inspiration and understand how a photo was edited but again they won't solve a photo by only clicking one button and getting the perfect look so personally the reason why I use preset is first of all for inspiration so for example here I have the collection from James popsis and I really like going through these just to get an idea of how I created my photos then I can hover one of here and I can look at the settings how this photo was edited and how it got to this result and understand how I can apply those techniques the second reason is that it's really a good way of saving some presets and then applying them through the whole trip so for example here I can save a preset for this one like we just did and finally just apply it everywhere inside of the photos so I can really easily afterwards I replicate this look throughout all my photos finally I can save a look for later so for example if I do another ski trip in a year or two I can come back and look at these photos and apply the same look to the same photos I'm going to take in the future again it might not be perfect because if the conditions are not the same so for example if there is some clouds outside or it's raining or something like that the photo preset I created here might not work for the other scenarios so this is why I have a gripe with photo presets now let's look at how I did my photos using my presets so first of all here I use this photo to create a look I wanted to have inside of my photos of the city of Leo I wanted something that made the photos look a little bit softer so I brought up here the blacks if you look at the curve right here and then I also made sure that the colors were nice vibrant and still very Poppy and also made sure that we could see the sky well so there was a lot of dynamic range inside of the photo so we can quickly go through the settings here so nothing too special inside of the light settings here like I said I brought the curve here to bring up the Shadows a little bit about the vibrant up quite a lot usually don't do that but here I think it was really nice colors instead of the buildings so I need to put that in front finally added some texture here and that's pretty much it very simple I have preset here I saved it and then I've come to the next photo here so first of all what we want to do is go inside of our settings here and just make sure we crop it like we want so I'm just going to do this very quickly for this video because that's not the main point of the video then we come inside of preset here we're going to come here we're going to look at the presets I have here here and we're going to apply Leon soft and vibrant and we see we're already pretty close to the result I want to have so here and it's not finished so it's not perfect like I said applying a preset shouldn't be the final edit you should always have to tweak it a little bit afterwards so what I do in this case is actually go through the different settings here so for example I'm going to bring down the exposure a little bit here I might want to bring the Shadows up a little bit in this picture I also applied a mask here at AI mask this will be for another video but here I apply the AI mask here to the sky to see the sky better so you can see here here I'm still tweaking some of the settings to get something closer to the final result so I think this one actually looks pretty good like this there wasn't too much to edit so the preset here allowed me to edit the photo much faster but it wasn't a one-click edit in the end I still had to do some tweaks afterwards and this is a theme throughout everything else so let's look at the next picture right here and I remember using this picture right here to create the look I wanted for my presets for the shots of the mountains in shamani and first of all here I went through the different presets I had so like I said I love using them as inspiration so I went here I went I went through some of uh gym popses I also have some from Pure McKinnon I think there's some here that look pretty good inside of here but they were a little bit too intense they really modified the colors way more I wanted to did something more realistic and that's what I was looking for inside of the edited images here this has a recommended tab here that is pretty cool you can all here and see some different ideas but I created it I liked here so again there's nothing too fancy inside of the here I do push the highlights and the Shadows a little bit more I want to get more dynamic range out of these photos because there's a lot of contrast inside of them again I have a little curve right here nothing too special the Vibrance here is not as high because I don't want to push the blues as much in this one I do trick the blues a little bit here to make them more on the tail side and this is just because the purple was looking a little bit weird that's a problem with Sony where the pictures really look purple um so again I went through all of these apply a little bit of texture but again very simple here again I went inside of here I created preset and then I can come here and apply this preset to my next picture but if you realize this doesn't quite look like the other version I have and this is because I applied even more editing to these photos and that's what I'm going to talk about in the next videos I'm going to look at a few regular examples right here this shot right here I was pretty much just applying the presets so if we go here I go back to the original version simply come here inside of our presets and apply the preset here we're going to see it's almost perfect just bring up the luminance and looks pretty good so very simple uh editing here we're going to look at the third and last preset right here and this one is for my photos at night so I got some incredible shots here with the cine in front the lighting in the background the Stars so this one's a little bit more advanced so if we come here we're going to look at this photo right here we're actually going to reset it to its original version again and we might look at it when it looks with after two settings so actually here it looks pretty good so I'm going to start by applying those with settings and we can go inside of our presets we can go on shamany at night oh it's looking already pretty good we can see here I might turn in a little bit here just reframe it to get a better look but now there's an important thing here inside of this preset there's actually a mask or just when it comes out the mask here and make sure it's properly aligned with the Stars in the background so this is looking pretty good I might bring up the luminicity a little bit more and might took a little bit more but that's a general idea of how I did my shots using the presets I'm quickly gonna go through a bunch of other photos just to show you how quickly you can edit all of your photos using some presets so the first one right here we're going to apply the city preset so Leon soft and vibrant here we're simply going to come here cropped it I do want to have a crop a little bit like this um I think something like this looks pretty good here it's a little bit too um high so we're going to bring down the exposure here and I think something like this looks pretty good then if we come on this one here this one you can see it's clearly way too uh purple in the general so I think the preset here is really going to help getting this right so here we're just going to continue here and we're gonna crop it just to make everything nice and vertical again I'm going pretty fast with these edits I would actually pass a lot more time on Davis here we're going to apply Auto setting it looks already pretty good here but we're going to come inside of the preset here apply our mounting preset bring up the exposure and it's looking pretty good here I think I can just strain it up a little bit here again looking pretty good might bring it up a little bit more just tweak a little bit of composition looking good now if we go at some shots of the night we're going to use our other preset that we have right here for the night so we're going to use chamonix at night we're going to apply this we're going to turn this around it does seem like a lot here the exposure is not right so I'm just going to bring up the exposure to bring back more detail in the front right here I think the contrast is very high so I might bring the contrast down a little bit just to adjust this um the sky also seems to be not perfect so we're gonna come here we're gonna go on the mask I'm gonna bring this mask up as this was the issue you see the mask was sitting properly aligned so I'm just going to put the mask if you want to learn more about masking that's going to be another video so definitely subscribe to learn about that and again just in a few clicks this one looks pretty good almost finished editing it we're going to skip a few photos this is one of my favorite shots and you're going to see this one simply applying the preset is going to be almost perfect so here I'm just going to start by as usual cropping it a little bit and straightening it and just making sure it's looking good apply it to settings looking pretty good already but now if we come here and we apply our melting preset again I'm going to bring back up the exposure a little bit here and I think something like this looks already pretty good this one is a little bit more work so for example here I'm actually going to apply the preset but it's not going to look exactly as I wanted to in the end so it's not actually looking pretty good here but if we look at the final edit here if we go in my versions right here we're going to see that my final it actually has a lot more red inside of here so if I wanted to go here I would go inside of the color settings I might change a little bit the red orange to make them look more red I might play with the Reds right here and make them look a little bit red too then go saturation bring in saturation of these maybe bring down the illuminates of the Reds something like this so this is very quick again I would pass more time to getting these exactly as I want but this is how with just a few clicks I started from the original image here to the finally edit image again very fast this is one of my favorite image from the whole trip and again here simply coming here cropping out the image um coming here there's actually more a lot more editing that has to be done on this photo we're going to apply the auto settings we're going to go in the preset right here we're going to apply the mountain preset we're going to bring up the exposure here and this is actually very close to the final edit I applied to this one so again if we look here at the final edit I have we're going to come here in the versions and we can look at the final edit and we can look at the version we have right now they're really not that far I took deliver the setting so here it seems like I brought up the contrast a little bit more maybe brought down the blacks I played a little bit with the settings like here I brought up the whites but again it's very easy Once you have a good preset for her base to adjust the settings and get something that's looking even better afterwards so if you're wondering why I keep saying that these are close to the final results and they're not the final results that's because there's two other editing techniques that I use on pretty much all the photos but these are going to be for the next two videos in this series I highly suggest that you go check out the link in the description if you want to see the full resolution photos before and after applying the presets and the other edits so this is a great way of seeing the different steps that I applied to get to the final shot I'm sure a few of you are very interested to get my presets and I decided to make them free because like I said it's good inspiration but you shouldn't be using them to edit all your photos automatically this should just be inspiration if you have these types of photos that you're trying to edit so to get access to it to free you have to go in the link down in the right description click on it it's going to bring you to a page that's going to ask you to join my newsletter my newsletter it's going to be a monthly newsletter when I'm going to share some of the things I did in last month so it might be some photo albums on my website it might be some of my posts on Instagram some of the videos I created so just a bunch of stuff that I did in the last few months but I don't want them to be too often because I don't want to be annoying with it and you can unsubscribe anytime if you want to there's no reason if you don't like the content just unsubscribe from it there's no worries at all so definitely go click the link down in the description if you want to make sure to get access to these free presets I hope this video was useful I made you understand how presets can be useful I think there's a lot of misconception here where a lot of people are trying to make money by selling their presets and it's not necessarily the good strategy in my case because I think it's a good way of learning how to edit a photo but it shouldn't be used as a way to do a one-click edit on the photo that's definitely the wrong way of using a preset if you enjoyed this video please let me know hitting like button below and definitely subscribe for the other parts of this series see you in the next one foreign
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What is this video about?
I just got back from a ski trip through Germany and France with a bunch of photos to edit, and I want to share what I've learned about presets while it's all fresh. This is the first video in a free series on photo editing, and it's all about presets: what they are, why they're useful, and how to actually use them without expecting them to be a magic one-click solution.
Here's the thing about presets that I think gets misunderstood a lot—they're not meant to automatically perfect every photo you throw at them. Presets are actually pretty simple to create. If I like how a photo looks, I can save those editing settings (minus exposure, which changes per image) and apply it to other photos from the same shoot. They work in Lightroom, on your phone, on your tablet, or even in different apps like Polar Photo Editor.
Where I think presets go wrong is when people buy them expecting a magic button. That's not what they are. I use presets for three things: inspiration—going through other photographers' presets to understand their editing approach; consistency—applying a saved look across a whole shoot so everything feels cohesive; and reference—coming back to a preset later if I shoot the same scene again. But here's the reality: applying a preset is just the start. You still need to tweak it. Exposure changes, lighting conditions change, so what works perfectly for one photo might need adjustments for the next.
In this video, I walk through exactly how I created three presets from my trip—one for the soft, vibrant city shots, one for the mountain landscape, and one for night scenes—and then show you how I applied them to edit photos quickly. You'll see that even after applying a preset, I'm always going in to adjust exposure, shadows, colors, and sometimes masks to dial in the final look. It's efficient, but it's not automatic.
I've made my presets free because I think they're valuable as learning tools and inspiration, not as shortcuts. If you want them, head to the link in the description—you'll just need to join my monthly newsletter where I share what I've been working on: photo albums, Instagram posts, videos, that kind of thing. No spam, and you can unsubscribe anytime.
This is part one of a series. There are two other editing techniques I use on almost every photo that I'll cover in the next videos, so stick around if you want the full picture of how I edit.