On the other hand, if there's a style that inspires you, is it worth dropping the equivalent of a pizza and a few beers to get an insight into a workflow and use that as another tool towards mastering Lightroom and developing a personal style? It's also a great way to support a photographer who has worked to carve a niche and share their knowledge. When the first line in every video's description is a link to the photographer's Lightroom preset pack, maybe it's time to unsubscribe.

YouTube comments (never a great source of information, admittedly) suggest that certain photographers are churning out video after video that are more about plugging their presets than they are about offering something insightful or educational. On the one hand, I wonder if there's a clique of well-established YouTube photography celebrities who are flogging their presets to a naive audience in order to generate some passive income from very little work and zero overhead. Having still not bought a preset, I'm interested to find out about the community's experience. As a result, your future images will have more potential when you go on to apply your newly acquired knowledge. If you like a photographer's editing, you can replicate it quickly by buying one of their presets, but how much are you going to learn as a result, and what are you going to achieve by replicating their look and feel? Sure, you can use the preset as a base from which to start, and you can begin figuring out how certain looks are achieved by digging into the various settings, but that time might easily be spent doing a few tutorials, developing your own style, and establishing a better understanding of the editing process. Photographer James Popsys didn't hold back in one of his videos last year: 'If you're buying people's presets, you're buying a shortcut that takes you out of the creative process,' he explained. Two random downloads are center and right.

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