Want to learn how to create and sell Lightroom presets? You’re in the right place.
Lightroom presets are like Instagram filters, but a whole lot better.
They’re pre-made configurations of settings in Adobe Lightroom that you can use to transform your photos in one click. Photographers and influencers often utilize them to achieve a specific ‘look’.
In this post, we’ll be showing you how you can create a passive income stream by creating and selling your own Lightroom presets online.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Why sell Lightroom presets?
Lightroom presets are one of the best digital products you can sell online. Here’s why:
- High market demand. Thanks to the growth of social media platforms like Instagram, there’s a huge market demand for unique photo editing filters right now. Everyone wants their feed to stand out and look visually stunning, so there are tons of potential customers for your presets.
- Great side income for photographers. If you’re a professional photographer, the chances are you already use Lightroom and have your own go-to, custom-made presets, so there’s really no reason not to list them for sale online. It could open up a new passive income stream for you for very little effort.
- Hone your craft. Making Lightroom presets gives you the opportunity to experiment with photo editing and develop your skills while making money at the same time.
- Unlimited stock. Once you’ve made a Lightroom preset once, you can sell it as many times as you want, with no stock to worry about. And fulfillment is as simple as providing the customer with a download link.
- Low overheads. There are very few expenses involved in selling Lightroom presets (or any digital product, for that matter), so the vast majority of your sales revenue will be profit.
How to make lightroom presets
First, let’s talk about how to create Lightroom presets. If you’ve already made your own presets and just want to know how to sell them, feel free to skip this part. If not, read on and we’ll walk you through it.
Choose a niche
Step number one is to choose your niche.
By that, we mean figuring out what kind of presets you want to make and who you’re going to sell them to.
Presets are typically sold in cohesive packs. Those that sell the best are designed around a specific theme with a clear use case in mind.
Here’s an example to illustrate what we mean. Take a look at this Night Sky preset pack:
It has a clear target market and use case: It’s targeted at astrophotographers and is meant to be used to process photos of the Milky Way and the starry night sky.
Here’s another example:
This preset pack is targeted at creative photographers working on photos for magazines/editorials. And it’s the most popular Lightroom preset on Envato Elements.
Like the two examples above, you should have a clear niche in mind before you start making your presets, and keep them all clustered around a single theme. That preset theme might be a specific use case, aesthetic, atmosphere, color, or anything else.
For example, you could create presets for:
- Portrait photographers
- Food photography
- Car photo processing
- Autumn photos
- Bringing out orange tones
- Applying a vintage look
You get the idea.
When choosing your niche, you should also try to find a gap in the market.
Ideally, you should create something there’s a clear demand for but with little competition. Keyword research tools can help with this by showing you what people are searching for. You can also browse preset marketplaces to see what sells well.
Choose some photos and import them to Lightroom
Once you’re clear on what kind of presets you want to sell, it’s time to start creating them. And for that, you’ll need two things:
- Adobe Lightroom software
- Some photos to edit
You’ll need at least 3 photos for each preset you plan on making: One for creating the initial edit, and two for testing how it looks when applied to different types of photos.
So if you’re hoping to create a pack with 10 different presets, you’ll need 30 photos in total.
The photos you use should make sense for the niche you’re targeting, but should also have some variety. For example, if you’re creating an astrophotography preset pack, they should probably all be shots of the night sky, but with different levels of white balance, exposure, etc.
If you’re creating a preset pack for landscape photographers, include a mix of photos shot at different times of day, some with water and some without water, etc.
Or if you’re creating presets for portrait photography, include a mix of photos with subjects that differ in skin complexion, age, gender, pose, etc.
Also, we’d recommend using RAW image files instead of JPEGs as presets tend to work better with RAW files.
Once you’ve selected your photos, import them to Lightroom and you’re ready to start editing.
Create your first edit
To create your first preset in Lightroom, you’re going to play around with the editing settings until you achieve the desired look.
There are a lot of sliders and things you can change when editing your photos.
For example, you can adjust brightness with the Exposure slider, change the texture/detail with the Clarity slider, and adjust coolness/warmth with the Temp slider. Plus, change the shadows, highlights, contrast, vibrance, and more.
This guide isn’t meant to be a complete crash course on how to use Lightroom, so we’ll assume you know the basics already for the sake of brevity.
However, we will briefly cover some important tips to keep in mind that specifically apply to the editing process when you’re creating presets.
The first tip is to never change the global white balance sliders. Here’s why.
Other photographers are going to use your presets on their own images, right? And each of these images will have been shot at a different white balance.
So even if a particular global white balance setting looks good on the images that you’re testing, it might not look good on theirs. That’s why you should always leave the white balance slider set to As Shot.
The next tip is to utilize curves. We don’t want to change the global white balance, but it’s possible to change the temperature of the photo using curves without affecting the global white balance.
To do so, select Tone Curve from the preset menu.
Then, you can make temperature adjustments that are relative to whatever global temperature the image has, so the effect will work correctly regardless of the photo being edited. You can also play around with the Calibration tool to adjust relative color temperatures.
The third tip is to utilize adaptive masks. Adaptive masks are another really powerful tool for making relative edits to photos, rather than global changes, which is what we’re aiming for.
Just click the masking icon, then select the part of the photo you want to apply changes to: Sky, Background, or Subject.
