How to Use Lightroom Presets in Photoshop
Regardless of your profession, certain tools quickly become trusted favorites. For many digital artists that tool is Adobe Photoshop and much like an old paintbrush, Photoshop has some quirks that make it tricky to use. It’s also not directly compatible with certain files, such as Lightroom presets. With so many amazing paid and free presets out there, we wanted to share a couple methods to use Lightroom presets inside of Photoshop.
The Long(ish) Method
This method is for those with access to both Lightroom and Photoshop. It’ll take a bit of work in each one to get the presets ready for Photoshop, but once it’s done you have some new ways to make your photos shine.
Step 1. Open an image in Lightroom and apply a preset, or create a new setting you would like and save that as a preset.
Step 2. Right click on the image and choose ‘Edit In>Open as Smart Object In Photoshop’. This will bring all of the adjustments you made and hold them in the smart object.
Step 3. With your new file in Photoshop, double click on the smart object in the layers panel and the image will open in Camera Raw. From here you can click the ‘Presets’ tab and save these settings as a new preset.
Step 4. Now, you can open any image you like inside of Camera Raw/Photoshop and apply the preset you created. You can also further adjust the settings and fine-tune your image. A whole world of Lightroom presets are ready to explore.
The Easy Method
If you don’t happen to have access to Lightroom—and are also using Mac OSX—you can simply use Preset Brewery by Adam Bardon. It’s cheap, easy to use, and lets you drag and drop Lightroom presets and convert them for use in Camera Raw/Photoshop. Here’s a quick video showing how it’s done:
