Creating and Exporting a Preset in Lightroom 3

After you have made a bunch of adjustments on an image, you might want to save that toning for later.  Maybe you just tried your hand at the vintage look from an earlier post and want to save that as a preset.  Well you can and you can even export that preset for others to use.  

After you have made all the adjustments for your image, all you need to do is go over the Preset box in the Develop Module and hit the plus button (+).

A dialog box will open up asking you which adjustments you want to save.  Usually the boxes that are checked by default are the ones to go with, but if you think you want to save any brush stroke, gradients, etc, then go ahead and check those as well.  This is also where you name the preset whatever you want and where you can add it to a new folder or the default User Presets folder.

Click create and boom. Done.  

Now say you want to give that preset to a friend or offer it on your site for others to use.  All you need to do is export the preset and send it.  To do this, right click on the preset you want to export.  When the dialog box pops up, click on "Export".

 

Now all you need to do is rename the file if you want and tell it where you want to save it.  That's it. Send the file to all your friends so they can steal your swagger.

If you are having any issues or want help with anything else, send me a message.  Also, if you are using Photoshop, you can use "action" to do roughly the same thing.  They come in handy, I promise.