Measured, not guessed
Give it the original and the edited version of the same photo and PresetForge reads the edit straight off the pixels — per-channel tone curves, colour mixer, grading, grain, vignette. Not a model guessing at slider values. Arithmetic, in a couple of seconds.
5 presets a month free · exact before/after included · no card
Pick a look
Shadows pushed blue, highlights pulled warm. The split is entirely in the channel curves — the white balance slider never moves.
Exported as a .xmp Lightroom reads without a conversion step — two clicks to install.
Derived preset
.xmp · .cube · .json
Point curve
Measured from the curve
Colour mixer · saturation
The measurement
The engine never asks what the photograph is of. It only asks what happened between the two files, which is a question with an answer.
Both frames are resampled to a common analysis size and every pixel is binned by its input value, separately in red, green and blue. A 20-megapixel pair gives roughly 80,000 samples per bin — enough that a single noisy pixel changes nothing.
For each bin, the median output value. Medians rather than means, because a median ignores the handful of pixels where a local adjustment or a healing brush broke the correspondence. A monotone cubic is then fitted through the result so the curve can never invert local contrast.
Apply the curves back to the original and look at what is left. Whatever remains is not tonal — it is per-hue. That residue is decomposed into the eight colour-mixer bands, the shadow/midtone/highlight grade, the grain field and the vignette falloff.
The derived preset is applied to the original and compared to the target. The mean absolute residual per channel goes on the result, so you can see how much of the look was reproducible and how much of it was masks and brushes that a global preset cannot express.
Three exports, one measurement
Generated from one source object, so the preset and the LUT cannot disagree with each other six months from now.
.xmp
Bare x:xmpmeta document, no byte-order mark, no xpacket wrapper, correct Supports* flags, colour grading written with the legacy SplitToning attribute names Adobe actually uses, bipolar sliders written with explicit signs. It imports as an ordinary preset with no conversion step.
Lightroom Classic · Lightroom desktop · Lightroom mobile · Camera Raw · Bridge
On every plan, including free.
.cube
A 33×33×33 3D LUT, produced by evaluating the same look across 35,937 grid colours. The tonal and colour character travels; the spatial parts — grain, vignette, clarity — cannot, and we say so rather than pretending otherwise.
Premiere · Resolve · Final Cut · OBS · camera monitors
.json
Every curve anchor, every band offset, the confidence and the residual. Not a format any application imports — it exists so the measurement is inspectable and so you can diff two looks against each other.
For scripting and for arguing with the result
What one image can tell you
Nothing can separate the edit from the scene without a reference frame. Not us, not a model, not a person. So single-image mode does the only honest thing available: it reads the photograph's tonal and colour statistics and produces a preset that pushes a neutral image toward them. That is a strong first draft and a poor final answer, and we would rather say so than sell it as extraction.
Before/after mode is different in kind, not degree. With both states of the same frame the transform is observable, and the result comes with an error figure you can check. It is the reason the product exists — which is why it is free, rather than the thing you have to pay to find out about.
The full method, step by stepPricing
You can see the exact curves without paying anything. Pro adds the colour panel, the finer curves, the LUT and batches.
$0forever
5 presets a month
$12per month
Unlimited presets
$79paid once
Unlimited presets
14 guides
Technical how-tos on Lightroom presets, tone curves, LUTs and colour matching. Checked against the current releases, and specific enough to act on.
Upload the original and the edited version of the same photo. The measurement takes a few seconds, and exact before/after mode is on the free plan.