In Lightroom – not the full-fat Classic version – press Shift-P to open the presets panel, click the three little dots at the top of the new panel, and choose Create Preset. Choose which elements of your edit you want to include, pick a snappy name and hit OK. Making a preset in Lightroom is pretty easy: make the changes you want to a sample image, then in Lightroom Classic, go to Develop > New Preset, or press Shift-CMD-N. Presets can do anything from subtly adjust images to making swinging changes.

These can be a single edit, such as a levels adjustment, or they can be more holistic – a curves change, a white balance tweak, levels, or a color-grading fix. The theory is simple: a Lightroom preset is simply a bundled-up set of edits, taken from the program's Develop module. Thank goodness, then, for Lightroom and its marvelous system of presets.

Getting a photo from rough-and-ready to print-perfect takes time, expertise and experience, especially when it comes to aping a particular style or working to get all your images stylistically consistent. Whether you’re an amateur or a pro, editing photos is a necessary evil.

Cinematic preset lightroom