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How to install Lightroom presets

April 8, 2016 by Rod Lawton

Lightroom Classic has some powerful image enhancement tools, as fans will know, and the ability to apply and store editing presets. But as well as creating your own, you can get presets from all sorts of different places and they’re really easy to install – and here’s how you do it.

  • More Lightroom articles
  • How to get the Lightroom/Adobe Photography Plans
  • Should you swap from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom?
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01 Free presets from ON1.com

You can start by checking out some free Lightroom presets from ON1. ON1 is not the only company offering free presets, but it does have a rather tasty collection supplied by different photographers and Lightroom experts that will get you started.

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02 Trey Ratcliff presets

I’ve chosen a set of presets from legendary travel Photographer and HDR expert Trey Ratcliff. You should take a look at his Stuck in Customs website. He’s also involved heavily in MacPhun’s Aurora HDR app.

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03 Find the Lightroom Presets folder

If you don’t know where to look on your hard disk, open the Lightroom preferences, select the Presets panel and click the ‘Show Lightroom Presets Folder’ button half way down on the right. This will display the Lightroom folder on your computer, and you need to open this and then open the Develop Presets folder within that.

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04 Copy across your presets

The presets downloaded as a zip file, so this needs expanding. Now all you do is drag the expanded folder (it contains all the individual preset files) into the Lightroom Develop Presets folder.

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05 Check out your new presets

If you did this while Lightroom was running, you’ll need to quit and restart it. Now you should see the new folder in your presets panel containing your new presets. I really like Trey’s preset effects but, Trey, some of your names are just… uh… a bit weird 😉

Read more: On1 Photo RAW 2019 review

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Filed Under: Tutorials

Rod Lawton has been a photography journalist for nearly 40 years, starting out in film but then migrating to digital. He has worked as a freelance journalist, technique editor (N-Photo), channel editor (TechRadar) and Group Reviews Editor on Digital Camera World. He is now working as an independent photography journalist. Life after Photoshop is a personal project started in 2013.

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