Presets are an awesome way to diversify your photography business. Creating a preset is a great project to work on during the off-season and it may help you make a little more money during that time too. Making your own preset doesn’t have to be difficult and once you’ve created your preset you can get creative with marketing it!

Here are 4 easy steps that you can follow to create your own preset and start making some extra money. 🤑

1. Edit a photo

The first step in creating a Lightroom Preset is simply doing all of the adjustments to an image. Keep in mind that the edit will be used on a variety of images so if you are editing an image that is underexposed and would need to brighten it substantially, these changes would be carried over to images that may not need this adjustment. When choosing the image you are editing and you are also able to exclude certain edits when creating your preset.

2. Save and test your Preset

Once you have done all of your edits, click the plus icon at the top of the preset tab on the left and select “create preset.” Give your preset a name and choose the group you’d like to save the new preset in. Then, check the boxes to indicate which adjustments you would like to include in the present, this is where you can exclude any edits you think should not be used.

Once you have saved your preset it is a good idea to test it on a variety of images to see how it works on different images.

3. Export your Preset

If you wish to share and sell your preset outside of Adobe Exchange (more on this in the next section) you can simply export your preset by right-clicking on the name of such a preset and then choose 'Export’. Your preset will be an XMP file, An XMP file is a metadata file used by Adobe programs. This can easily be shared and used by anyone with Adobe Lightroom Classic.

If you are planning on selling a few presets you should add them all to a folder and zip the folder. Make sure you give your presets informative names that will help the user find the right one they are looking for. E.g. “Indoor portrait preset”.

4. Selling your Preset

When it comes to selling your Lightroom Classic preset you have a couple of options. Adobe has a platform called Adobe Exchange that allows you to join, create a profile and create listings. Setting up to sell your preset on Adobe Exchange is a fairly straightforward process. Once you have signed up and created an account can create a listing. In order to charge for your listing/preset, you will need to create an account with their third-party payment provider FastSpring. You can add an image and description to your listing and give it a description so that it stands out too.

Alternatively, you can sell your preset on your own website. In order to do this, you will need to set up e-commerce capabilities on your website. Then, once someone has made a purchase you can direct them to a download page or just send them an email with the file attached to download. Better yet, do both!

You should also include some instructions on how to download and install your preset onto Lightroom. Something like this would work great:

Thanks for purchasing my preset!

To download and install the preset follow these steps:

• Download and unzip the file and open the folder
• Open Lightroom
• Choose Lightroom > Preferences 
• There will be a new window that appears, there will be several tabs at the top of the new window. Select the Presets tab.
• Click on the button labelled “Show Lightroom Presets Folder” 
• Copy Downloaded Folder (or Create new Folder) with your presets into the develop presets folder. 
• Restart Lightroom

That’s it! Your presets can now be found in the presets section of the develop module of Lightroom.

That is everything you need to create and start selling your very own preset! Now it’s time to start marketing your preset, a great place to start is on your own social media channels. Check out our blog for more handy articles for photographers including Tribe Archipelago: Presets worth your money, Presets: to sell them or not? And How to Speed Up Lightroom.