PresetForge vs buying a preset pack
Preset packs are not a rip-off. They are somebody's taste, sold. The question is whether their taste fits your photographs — and whether you already have the look you want.
Where buying a preset pack wins
- Taste is the expensive part, and a good pack is a photographer's taste made portable.
- A well-made pack has been tested across many kinds of image, which your own first preset has not.
- Packs often include camera profiles (.dcp), which are much harder to build than presets.
- Instant variety — twenty starting points to try, rather than one.
- Support, updates, and someone to ask when it does not work.
Where measuring wins
- The look is yours: derived from a photograph you already edited and already like.
- You can see the measurement — the actual curve, not a marketing image.
- No licensing question about presets you built from your own work.
- Free tier lets you test the approach on your own photographs before paying anything.
Buy a pack when you want a look you do not have. Measure when you already have it and want it repeatable.
What a preset pack actually is
A folder of .xmp files, each a few dozen numbers. That is not a criticism — the numbers encode judgement developed over years, and that judgement is worth paying for. But it does mean the value is entirely in whether those specific numbers suit your photographs.
The marketing images cannot tell you. They were shot in ideal light specifically to flatter the pack. The useful test is whether the sample photographs resemble your work — same kind of light, same kind of subject, same kind of exposure discipline. If a pack is demonstrated on golden-hour beach portraits and you shoot indoors, the numbers will not transfer however good they are.
The problem a pack does not solve
Most people who go looking for presets already have a photograph they edited and loved. They are not short of a look; they are short of a way to repeat it. A pack does not help with that, because it contains somebody else's look.
That is the case measurement is built for. Give it the original and the edited version of the same frame and it derives the per-channel tone curves, the per-band colour shifts, the split toning, the grain and the vignette, and writes them as a preset. The look you get back is one you already know you like, because you made it.
Where a pack is clearly the better buy
When you want something you have never made. If you admire a particular photographer's colour and they sell it, buying it is by far the most direct route and £40 is cheap for a shortcut through several years of taste. Measurement cannot invent a look; it can only recover one.
Packs that include real profiles are also a genuinely different product. A .dcp profile sits at the base of the rendering pipeline, before your exposure and white balance decisions, and building one requires colour-target shots and software most people do not have.
The cost comparison, honestly
A pack is typically £25–£60 once. PresetForge is free for five presets a month with .xmp export and exact before/after mode included, £12 a month for unlimited plus the full colour panel, .cube LUT export and batch apply, or £79 once for the same thing forever. If you need one look, a pack may well be cheaper. If you are building a library from your own back catalogue, the lifetime option stops being a subscription question quite quickly.