Free alternatives to paid Lightroom preset packs
Preset packs are not a scam, but they are usually a worse deal than the three free options below — and one of those options produces a preset that is actually yours.
772 words4 min readUpdated
What you are paying for
A paid pack is a folder of .xmp files. Each one is a few dozen numbers. That is not a criticism — the numbers encode taste, and taste is the expensive part — but it does mean the value is entirely in whether those specific numbers suit your photographs, and you cannot tell that from the marketing images, which were shot in perfect light specifically to flatter the pack.
The honest test before buying: ask whether the sample images look like your photos. If the pack is demonstrated on golden-hour beach portraits and you shoot indoor documentary work, the numbers will not transfer, however good they are.
Option 1: the presets already in Lightroom
Adobe ships a substantial preset library that most people scroll past. The Presets panel contains Premium groups and a Style section, with film-inspired presets and profiles added in the April 2026 release under names like Warm Gold and Light Sage. There are also the Adaptive families — Adaptive: Portrait, Adaptive: Sky, Adaptive: Subject, and eight Adaptive Landscape presets added in 2026 — which invoke AI masking and therefore do things no third-party pack can do, because a plain .xmp cannot carry a mask.
Cost: included. Quality: high, and specifically tested by Adobe against a very wide range of images, which is more than most packs can claim.
Option 2: camera-matching profiles
Before you buy a look, check whether what you actually want is your camera's own rendering. In the Basic panel, open the Profile Browser and look under Camera Matching — these reproduce your manufacturer's JPEG picture styles (Fujifilm's film simulations appear here for Fuji raws, and they are excellent). A profile plus a small curve adjustment gets a lot of people exactly where they wanted to go.
Profiles also behave better than presets in one important way: because they sit at the base of the pipeline rather than on top of it, they do not fight with your exposure and white balance decisions.
Option 3: build one from a photo you already like
The best preset for your work is the edit you already did and liked, made repeatable. You do not need to buy somebody else's taste when you have a folder full of your own.
By hand, that means opening the edited photo, clicking + on the Presets panel, choosing Create Preset, and unchecking everything that belongs to the frame rather than the look — see creating a preset from a photo for the full checklist.
If you no longer have the settings — the edit happened in another app, or on your phone, or years ago — you can recover them by measurement instead. Feed the original and the edited version of the same frame to PresetForge and it derives the per-channel tone curves directly from the pixels. That mode is on the free plan: five presets a month, .xmp export, eight-anchor curves. Which is to say you can find out whether this works on your own photographs without paying anything, which is not true of a preset pack.
What free packs from blogs and creators are worth
Free packs used as a mailing-list lead magnet are usually one or two genuinely considered presets alongside several filler variations. Take them, install them, and then do the thing almost nobody does: open the .xmp files in a text editor. They are plain XML. Five minutes reading four presets will teach you more about how looks are constructed than a month of dragging sliders, and you will immediately see which ones are three sliders in a trenchcoat.
When paying is the right call
Buying is worth it in three cases. When you want a specific photographer's taste and they are selling it, and taste is the actual product. When a pack includes real profiles (.dcp or profile .xmp) rather than only presets, because profiles are much harder to build yourself. And when the pack is genuinely a system — a coherent set with consistent strength and a documented workflow — rather than forty numbered variations.
What is rarely worth it is a pack bought to solve "my photos do not look good", because that is almost never a preset problem. It is usually exposure, white balance, or light.
Common questions
- Are free Lightroom presets worse than paid ones?
- Not inherently. Both are lists of slider values. Paid packs are more likely to be tested across a range of images and to come with support, but plenty of free presets are better built than plenty of paid ones.
- Can I sell presets I made myself?
- Yes — the settings you arrive at are your own work. Be careful with presets derived from someone else's images or from a licensed pack, and avoid naming presets after films, brands or photographers, which raises trademark questions independent of the colour science.