Are photo presets and filters actually worth using?

Presets are sold as a look you can buy. What they actually are is a saved list of slider positions, which lands differently on every photograph depending on its exposure, its colour and its subject.

Step by step

1. Understand what is being applied.A preset stores the positions of the tone, colour, curve and grain controls. Applied to your file, it moves those sliders to those numbers regardless of what your photograph needed. Nothing intelligent happens.
2. Correct the file first, then apply.Get exposure and white balance right, then apply the preset on top. A preset applied to a photograph that is a stop dark produces a photograph that is a stop dark with a colour grade on it.
3. Expect to adjust after applying.Almost always exposure, often white balance and contrast. Treat the preset as a starting point that gets you eighty percent of the way, not as an output.
4. Use them where consistency is the point.A set of listing photographs, an event, a holiday album, a series for social media. Applying the same treatment to a whole set is the case where presets genuinely save time and produce a better result than editing each separately.
5. Make your own.When you finish an edit you are happy with, save the settings as a preset. Three or four of your own — a general one, a black and white, a warm one, a flat one for difficult light — are worth more than a hundred bought ones because they suit your camera and your taste.
6. Be sceptical of preset packs.They are built on particular cameras, particular light and often on RAW files. Applied to a phone JPEG in a British winter, a preset built for a Californian golden hour produces something odd. Try before buying where possible.
7. Know the difference from a filter.A social media filter is generally a fixed, baked effect applied on export. A preset in editing software is a set of adjustable slider positions you can then modify. The second is a tool; the first is a decision you cannot revise.
8. Watch what heavy grading hides.A strong grade with crushed blacks and a colour cast disguises poor exposure, wrong white balance and soft focus. It also dates quickly — heavily filtered photographs are usually identifiable to a particular year.

Tips

• Reduce the strength of a preset rather than accepting it whole. Most editors have an amount or opacity control for exactly this.
• Black and white presets are the most useful bought ones, because they mostly rearrange tone rather than imposing a colour that fights your file.
• Keep one preset that only fixes your camera's known quirks — lens correction, a slight colour shift, a default sharpening level. Apply it on import to everything.

Common mistakes

• Applying a preset instead of correcting exposure — The preset moves the sliders to fixed positions, so a file that needed a stop more light still needs a stop more light. Correct first, style second.
• Using a different preset on every photograph in a set — The set stops reading as a set. Consistency is the main practical benefit of presets and mixing them throws it away.

Questions people ask