How to Create and Sell Lightroom Presets

The Complete Guide to Selling Lightroom Presets

Selling Lightroom presets is one of the simplest digital product businesses a photographer can start. A preset pack has no inventory, no shipping, and high margins, and a good pack can sell for years. Here is how to build one from scratch, based on what actually works.

To turn these ideas into a fast, repeatable edit, our Lightroom presets library gives you a head start you can build on.

Step 1: Build Your Preset Pack

A competitive preset pack needs 10 to 20 presets with clear use cases. The best-selling packs are niche-specific: a pack built for real estate interiors, wedding film looks, clean portraits, or food photography outsells a generic “moody tones” collection because buyers can see their own problem in the before and after.

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Step 2: Create Presets That Actually Sell

The difference between presets that sell and presets that sit on your hard drive:

1. Start with 50 or more test images across different lighting conditions. Your preset must work on daylight, shade, golden hour, indoor, and mixed lighting, not just one perfect image.
2. Focus on skin tones. The most common complaint about presets is weird skin color. Use the HSL panel to protect skin: keep orange hue and saturation moves small and deliberate.
3. Make subtle adjustments. Beginners over-edit. Professional presets shift the mood without screaming “filtered.” Keep individual slider moves moderate.
4. Name them intuitively. “Warm Sunset Glow” tells the buyer what it does; “Preset 07” does not.
5. Include variations. A lighter and darker variation of each base preset triples the pack’s flexibility.

Step 3: Package Professionally

Your preset pack needs XMP files for Lightroom Classic on desktop, DNG files for Lightroom Mobile, a short installation guide with screenshots for Classic, CC, and Mobile, at least five before-and-after sample pairs, and a single ZIP containing everything. Buyers who cannot install your preset leave bad reviews; buyers who install it in two minutes recommend it.

Step 4: Choose Your Sales Platform

The honest platform picture, with fees worth checking before you commit since they change:

• Your own site (WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads): the best margins, full control over pricing and email capture, but no built-in discovery. This is where you want to end up.
• Gumroad: around 10% plus a fixed per-transaction fee on direct sales, and a much higher cut on sales that come through its Discover marketplace. Fast setup, handles sales tax for you, good for validating demand.
• Etsy: built-in marketplace traffic, but a transaction fee of about 6.5% plus listing and payment processing fees, and heavy price pressure from competing sellers.
• Creative Market: a design-savvy audience and higher average prices, with a default revenue share of around 50% to the shop.
• FilterGrade: a photography-focused marketplace with a targeted audience and a significant commission.

Our recommendation: sell from your own website, like we do in the SYA preset shop, and use a marketplace as a secondary channel for discovery. Owning the customer relationship and the email list is worth more than any marketplace’s traffic.

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Step 5: Marketing Your Presets (Free Methods)

1. Pinterest: create before-and-after pins for each preset. Pins keep sending traffic for months, which makes Pinterest the best long-term free channel for visual products.
2. YouTube: a short “editing with my presets” video showing the transformation, with your shop linked in the description.
3. Blog SEO: tutorials that naturally reference your presets, targeting buyer-intent searches like “best Lightroom presets for [niche]”.
4. Free sample preset: give away one preset from the pack in exchange for an email address, then offer the full pack to that list.
5. Short-form video: 15-second before-and-after transformation clips with the preset name overlaid.

For more on running the business side, our photography business guides cover pricing, marketing, and client work in depth.

Want to go further? The ShutYourAperture Academy’s Edit Like You Mean It: The Complete Lightroom Editing Course (10 modules, 42+ lessons) is built to help you learn to edit with a clear workflow, from catalog organization to color.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many presets should be in a pack?

Minimum 8, ideal 12 to 15, maximum 25. Fewer than 8 feels thin; more than 25 overwhelms buyers and dilutes the pack’s identity. Each preset should serve a clear purpose.

What file format should presets be in?

XMP for Lightroom Classic desktop (the standard since Lightroom 7.3). The older .lrtemplate format still works but XMP is preferred. For Lightroom Mobile, export each preset applied to a sample image as a DNG file and include those in the pack.

Can I use AI to create Lightroom presets?

AI can help you batch-test presets across images, but the creation itself should be manual. The value of your presets is your editing style and experience; generic machine-made looks have no competitive advantage.

How do I prevent piracy of my presets?

You cannot fully prevent it. Focus on regular updates for paying customers, tutorials that make the paid pack more valuable than a pirated copy, and a community around your brand. Buyers who like your style will buy from you regardless.

Should I offer a money-back guarantee?

Yes. A clear 30-day guarantee removes the buyer’s risk on a digital product they cannot preview in their own workflow, and refund rates on digital goods are typically low. The goodwill is worth far more than the occasional refund.

Once the pack is built, the business side is its own game: pricing, platform fees, and marketing. Our guide to selling Lightroom presets online covers that funnel in depth.