Importing Lightroom Presets

I know most new Lightroom users love the Presets that come installed with Lightroom. Adobe ships LIghtroom with 18 different Presets that are a collection of some basic editing Presets like Black and White, Sepia and are actually quite useful. But for those of you who want to have some unique Lightroom Presets there are a few options; you can either create your own (visit our article on creating your own Lightroom Presets) or download/buy Lightroom Presets online (also check out our list of some great free lightroom presets)

Today I want to write a quick overview of how to import Lightroom Presets if you have downloaded them from a website. But first for those of you who don’t know what presets really are here is a overview of Lightroom Presets. Lightroom is a non-destructive way of editing, what that basically means is that you are not making changes to the photo as you go along, instead you are entering in a bunch of instructions that Lightroom shows on a preview of the image (i.e. Exposure +20, Contrast +35, etc…) When you go to save the image Lightroom takes all of these edits and applies them to the image when saving them. Since you are basically creating a list of instructions to the program on things to apply to the image recreating that same exact look is simple with Presets. A Preset just takes a snapshot of all of the changes you entered in for a specific shot and gives you a way with one click to apply all of those same exact changes to your image.

So if you do find some amazing presets online and want to add them to your Preset library how do you go about that? Here is a quick guide:

Open up Lightroom and go to the Develop module

On the left expand the Presets list so you see the list of Presets and Folders. Right click (on Mac control click) anywhere on the list of folders and a pop up window will appear.

Click Import and then navigate to where you stored the file

That’s it, now sit back and enjoy your new preset

Also if you have a lot of presets in Lightroom and want to keep them organized, you can add new folders through that same pop up menu and drag and drop actions into folders. We will be posting some more free Lightroom actions soon that you can download so check back soon, or add your email at the top of our site to be notified of each new post so you don’t miss anything.