A lot of photographers look down on presets in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and actions in Adobe Photoshop. This isn’t without reason. When people first start learning to post-process images, they often get too heavy-handed and overindulge in bad presets they found online. I cringe when I look back at some of my earliest images.

Once people move on from slapping a heavy vignette on every image, they normally stop using presets or actions and start from scratch with every photo. This is far from a bad thing—every picture needs to be assessed individually—but there is an element of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Presets and actions can, and should, still have a place in your workflow. Let’s look at how and where they should fit in.

For this tutorial I’m going to be addressing both Lightroom’s presets and Photoshop’s actions. However, to keep things simpler I’m going to refer to both as presets unless there’s a reason to draw a distinction.