Lightroom presets are like magic: with one click, you can apply your favorite styles to any image. In this article we look at how to create a Lightroom preset and then sample some of the web's best free preset offerings.

As Lightroom's popularity has increased, so has the quality of presets to modify and enhance images. Because Lightroom is a non-destructive image editor, we can easily try out all types of presets and not change the original image file. This makes it easier than ever to experiment with applying effects to your photos.

1. Top Lightroom Presets from Envato Elements

If you want professional level presets, Envato Elements has popular, affordable preset packs in every style. There are preset packs for everything from wedding photography presets to cinematic film style presets. 

Here are just a handful of the Lightroom Presets available for sale on our digital marketplace:

1. 50 Premium Food Photography Lightroom Presets

This is a comprehensive suite of Lightroom presets that will give your food photos a professional, faded, and stylish finish. This food collection is a must-have for food photographers, wedding photographers, and food bloggers. With this collection, you will be able to quickly and easily add a professional finish to your food images.

2. Night Sky Lightroom Presets

Night Sky Lightroom Presets includes 11 unique presets that are ideal for processing the Milky Way and other starry photos.

Presets included:

• “Baseline” for an excellent starting point when processing night sky photos.
• “Boost Shadows” can help recover foreground areas in your night photos.
• “Cool a Warm Milky Way” will apply cooler tones to your scene.
• “High Contrast” is perfect for creating a dramatic photo with lots of pop.
• “Raise Highlights” is great for making the Milky Way pop in darker photos.
• “Reduce Light Pollution” will help reduce pollution from lights in your photo.
• “Sharp Black and White” creates a dramatic scene with pinpoint stars.
• “Smooth Dream” gives a wispy, ethereal look to your photo.
• “Vibrant Milky Way” creates punchy colors that really stand out.
• “Warm a Cold Milky Way” will apply warmer tones to your scene.
• “Washed Out” creates an aged, antique look.

3. Winterchrome Lightroom Presets

Add a winter holiday feel to your photography with this set of family, lifestyle and portrait presets for Lightroom. Beautiful skin-tones, warm and cold variations, and a special analog touch will make your images stand out!

4. Light Leaks Vol. 2: 20 Lightroom Presets

This is a set of presets for Adobe Lightroom that helps photographers to easily add a particular light effect typical of some vintage photos. All of the presets have been lovingly researched to ensure your photos look instantly amazing. They are all 100% non-destructive and work on photos with any style of lighting.

5. Monocrom B/W Lightroom Presets

This package contains 16 premium Lightroom effects that are perfect for photographers and graphic designers. They have all been created with precise calibration adjustments to bring your images to life using powerful tools and professional methods.

6. Editorial / Magazine Lightroom Presets

Editorial photography often has that high key, bright style to make it stand out. This package of presets helps you recreate that style. Add those presets to bring a publication-ready style to your images.

7. Night Photo Lightroom Presets

Ever spend a night out capturing photos as blurry as your memories? These photos capture the spirit of night photography perfectly. Use the 20 styles for your late-night photography escapades.

8. Manhattan Mobile & Desktop Lightroom Presets

As the preview images show, the focus of the Manhattan Lightroom preset pack is modern and fashionable styles. These would feel right at home on any of the most popular Instagram accounts. Use them for a fresh and modern photo look.

9. PRO Landscape and Travel Lightroom Presets

For photographers, half the fun of travel is capturing images on the trip. There's a certain style that brings travel photography to life, and these presets have that style. Use them to rapidly edit the countless images you shoot.

2. How to Make Your Own High-Quality Lightroom Presets

Creating presets in Lightroom is a breeze! It takes just a few steps to create your own custom preset. The first step is to enter the Develop module by pressing "D" on the keyboard, or by clicking on Develop at top right.

Make Changes and Adjustments

Next, use the settings on the panel on the right to apply some settings to an image. You can tweak exposure, adjust curves and black levels, and even apply custom color effects. Additional options such as lens corrections are also available.

Develop options include all of the image tweaks you'll need to adjust your images to perfection.

Now that you have applied some settings to the image, you've laid the groundwork laid to create a preset with. Any settings applied to the image are now slated to be added to the preset.

Save Your Preset

On the left side, you'll see the panel that features presets. To create a new preset, all that you need to do is press the "+" button. Now, a new window appears that allows us to customize the settings to include in the preset. Each portion of the effects we applied can be either checked or unchecked to include within the preset.

After you press the "+", a list of options comes up. This window uses the settings you've applied to the active image as the basis for the new preset. Unchecking each individual option allows us to exclude that adjustment from the preset.

After choosing what parts of the edit that you want to include on the edit, make sure to give it a name and then press "Save." That's it! You now have presets, ready to apply to your images.

Settings like exposure, white balance, and noise reduction typically aren't included in presets; it's better to adjust these on a case-by-case basis. 

3. How to Install Lightroom Presets

If you've downloaded other presets, you will need to install them in Lightroom in order to use them. Often times, presets will come in packs in zip archives. The first step will be to extract the zip files to a folder on your computer.

Keep Your Presets Organized

After extracting the presets, the first thing that I like to do is right-click in the Preset panel and create a new folder for my downloaded presets. I like putting all of my custom presets in their own folder to keep things organized.

After we've created your folder for presets, all that we need to do is right-click the folder you created and then choose Import.

A window will pop up to allow us to browse to the folder with the presets we downloaded. Point it to the folder of you want to install, and then select the presets to add to Lightroom. You can select multiple presets by holding shift and clicking to select a range of presets.

Click Import to confirm and that's all that there is to it! Your downloaded presets are now ready to use.

4. Free Lightroom Presets

Not ready to pay for Lightroom presets? Check out the free alternatives below.

1) WhiteSnow

2) Cross Processed Look

3) Trey Ratcliff's Lightroom Presets (pack of 7)

Email address required.

4) Color Cream Wash

Email address required. Included in pack of 5.

5) Float

6) Nicolesy Matte

Email address required.

7) Cinema Stock 1

8) Soft Pastel

9) Guava Jelly

Email address required.

10) TVK

11) Grainy Matte

12) Touch of Drama

Email address required. Included in pack of 5.

13) Drama Queen

14) Chic Vixen

15) BeArt HDR

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

16) Vintage HDR

17) Favorite Film

18) Binnian

Requires email address.

19) Vintage

20) Cherry Blossom

Email address required.

21) Autumn Road

Facebook page like required.

22) Romantic Matte

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

23) Soft Blue

24) Film-Inspired Preset

25) BeArt Kodak

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

26) Free HDR III

27) Turquoise

28) B&W Romance

Included in pack of 5. 

29) Film Landscape

30) Vintage Eye Candy

31) Silver Lining

Included in pack of 5. 

32) Pink Velvet

33) BeArt Green Film

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

34) Old Brownie

35) Vibrant Color

36) Boost

37) Summertime - HDR Time

Email address required. Included in pack of 12.

38) Soft Enhance

39) Zen Portrait

Email address required.

40) Somber HDR

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

41) Fuji Film Portrait Style

42) Rustic Vintage

43) BeArt High Contrast

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

44) Soft Matte

45) Pastel Haze

46) Shadow Crusher

47) Realistic HDR

48) Iceland Winter Edition

Pack of 10. Email address required.

49) Film Portrait

50) Soft Dreams

Email address required. Included in pack of 12.

51) Silky SnowOverlay

Email address required. 

52) Vintage Landscapes

Pack of 10. Email address required.

53) Sweet Tea

Email address required.

54) Color Love

55) BeArt Old Cinema

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

56) Graphic Tee

57) BeArt Dominic

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

58) High Contrast B&W

59) Tempo

Email address required. Included in pack of 12.

60) Forest Colors

Pack of 10. Email address required.

61) Detailed Matte

62) Soft Newborn

63) BeArt BW Film

64) Warm B&W

65) Milky

66) Elegant Fade

67) August Sunset

68) Warmth Right

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

69) Butterflies

Email address required. Included in pack of 12.

70) Zen Film 1

71) Beach Vintage

Included in pack of 4.

72) Clean Face

73) Sun Glare

Included in pack of 4.

74) Marshmallow Softness - Original

Included in pack of 4.

75) Instant Hipster - Amaro

Included in free pack of 6; download link is in sidebar.

76) Underwater Moments

77) Moody

Download link is in the sidebar.

78) Pop Portrait

79) Instant Hipster - Nashville

Included in free pack of 6; download link is in sidebar.

80) PG Vintage

81) Soft Wash

Email address required. Included in pack of 20.

82) Vintage Garden

83) Gobustan

Download link in the sidebar.

84) Amroco

85) Cheap B&W Film

86) Summer Memories

Email address required. Included in pack of 12.

87) Blue Enhance

88) Free Dragan Style Preset

Download link is in the description.

89) Wet Plate Chocolate Shadows

Email address required. Included in pack of 5.

90) Matte Film

Pack of 2. Download link is in the sidebar.

91) Marshmallow Softness - Vivid

Pack of 4. Download link is in the sidebar.

92) Zen Film B&W

93) Mysterious Preset

94) Horns

Download link is in the sidebar.

95) Light Leak

Download link is in the sidebar.

96) Purple Nature

97) Instant Hipster - Inkwell

Pack of 4. Download link is in the sidebar.

98) Junior Preset

Download link is in the sidebar.

99) Sepia Vintage

100) Instant B&W

Improve You Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Skills

If you're interested in Lightroom presets, these tutorials will feed your preset habit:

1. Many of the presets in this tutorial are stylistic presets that style the entire image. Check out my tutorial on Toolkit presets to learn about presets that speed up your workflow.
2. Harry Guinness has a great tutorial, "In Defence of Presets" where he shares his own reasons for using presets.
3. Learn how to make Creative Color Adjustments in Adobe Lightroom, and then save them as presets.

• How to Create Toolkit Presets in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

  In this tutorial, you'll learn one of my favorite Lightroom workflow tips: mapping my most common adjustments to one click presets.

• In Defence of Presets: 5 Reasons to Automate Your Post-Production Workflow

  Presets get a bad rap, but they should have a place in every digital photographer's workflow. In this tutorial I look at where those places are and identify...

• How to Make Creative Color Adjustments in Adobe Lightroom

  Learn hue, saturation and luminance controls in Adobe Lightroom to build your own custom style.

• How to Split-Tone Process Black and White Photos in Adobe Lightroom

  Split toning is the process of adding different colours to the shadows and the highlights of an image. In this screencast I'll show you how to use Lightroom...

What are your favorite Lightroom presets? Let me know in the comments.