How Professionals Use Presets to Elevate Their Work
If you’ve ever admired the work of professional photographers or graphic designers and wondered how they consistently produce such stunning visuals, chances are presets are part of their secret sauce. Presets—pre-configured settings that can be applied to photos with a single click—aren’t just for beginners looking to save time. Even seasoned pros use them to streamline their workflow, maintain a cohesive style, and push their creativity further. In this post, we'll dive into how professionals leverage presets to produce world-class content without sacrificing quality or creativity.
1. Speed and Efficiency
For professionals, time is money. Whether it’s a high-end fashion photographer juggling multiple shoots in a week or a wedding photographer editing hundreds of images, efficiency is key. This is where presets become invaluable.
Instead of spending hours editing each photo from scratch, pros can apply a preset that instantly adjusts exposure, color, contrast, and more. It gives them a solid base to work from, allowing for quicker turnaround times without compromising on quality. While they may tweak the final image to perfection, starting with a preset saves significant time and effort, especially when dealing with large batches of photos.
2. Maintaining a Signature Style
A consistent style is one of the hallmarks of a successful professional photographer. Whether it’s the dreamy, ethereal vibe of fine art photography or the crisp, high-contrast look of urban fashion shots, presets help maintain a signature aesthetic across multiple shoots and projects.
Many pros even create their own custom presets that align perfectly with their personal brand. This ensures that every image they deliver, whether it’s for a client’s portfolio or their own social media, aligns with their unique style and creative vision.
3. Experimentation Without the Risk
One of the advantages of using presets is the freedom to experiment. Professionals often use presets as a starting point to explore new creative ideas without having to commit fully. They can apply different styles quickly and see how it affects the mood or feel of the photo, giving them the ability to step outside their comfort zone and try something new.
With presets, it’s easy to switch between different looks—vintage, moody, vibrant, or black and white—without the fear of permanently altering the original image. This allows for a faster creative process and the ability to deliver diverse results to clients or for personal projects.
4. Perfecting Consistency Across Projects
Consistency is essential, especially when working on campaigns or projects that require uniformity across multiple images. Professionals often have to deliver photo sets or series where each image must have the same look and feel. This is particularly common in fields like product photography, editorial work, and brand collaborations.
By using presets, professionals ensure that each photo has the same tone, exposure, and color balance, making sure that everything looks polished and cohesive. This is especially important when delivering images for websites, advertising, or social media, where consistency is crucial to building a recognizable brand identity.
5. Versatility Across Different Editing Software
Most professionals work with various editing software, from Lightroom and Photoshop to Capture One and others. One of the reasons presets are so popular is their versatility. Many professionals have custom presets that they can use across different platforms, giving them a seamless editing experience no matter the software they’re working with.
Custom presets allow photographers and designers to stay organized and ensure their workflow remains smooth and efficient across all editing tools. It doesn’t matter if they’re retouching in Photoshop or batch-editing in Lightroom—their presets travel with them, ensuring that their unique editing style is preserved.
6. Customizing for Client Preferences
Professionals know that client preferences vary, and presets offer a quick way to customize edits for different tastes. Some clients may prefer warmer, softer tones, while others might want a more dramatic, high-contrast look. Instead of reinventing the wheel every time, pros can apply a relevant preset, tweak it to match the client’s specific needs, and deliver the final product faster.
Many photographers and designers maintain a library of presets tailored to different moods or project types, so they can easily match their edits to the client’s desired aesthetic. This allows for flexibility in delivering the exact look clients want without spending extra hours manually adjusting each image.