What Real Estate Agents Should Know About Lightroom Presets

Written by Ashley Sutphin Posted On Sunday, 15 October 2023 00:00

If you’re a real estate professional, your photography is a top priority. You’re facing a lot of competition when it comes to beautiful real estate photos, but using Lightroom presets might help you stay distinctive.

We’ll cover what you should know about Lightroom presets and how they work to help you figure out if you should integrate them into your marketing.

What is Lightroom?

If you’re entirely new to photography, what is Lightroom?

Adobe Lightroom is a photo editor. Lightroom has some of the same features as Photoshop, but it’s more than just a software solution to edit photos. You can also import, manage and organize your photos.

Lightroom is described as a non-destructive photo editor. You don’t have to worry about the save button as you do with Adobe Photoshop because all of your edits are automatically saved in your catalog. The catalog is a database of your history and edits.

If you shoot any of your own raw photos, it’s a good idea to import them into Lightroom. You can do your basic editing here, like cropping, exposure, and white balance.

What Are Presets?

Presets are a set of instructions that come in a file. When you use them, your photos are automatically adjusted based on those instructions. It’s kind of like a high-end Instagram filter.

This way, you’re saving time because you don’t have to spend hours tweaking the perfect photos.

A Lightroom preset configures settings within a file, and you don’t have to know much about the technical details to take advantage. You can import and then install your file into Lightroom and apply it to your photos, so you get beautiful outcomes with a single click.

You can do it on your phone or your desktop.

If you want to make more changes once you’ve applied the preset, you can do that as well.

When you use your preset, while you’re just making a single click, there might be hundreds of changes in shadows, hues, colors, contrast and grain.

Presets in Real Estate

There’s a lot of benefits to using presets if you’re a real estate professional.

When you use presets, you are of course getting the most beautiful photographs. They look more “finished” than they would otherwise. You’re going to be able to brand yourself as more polished and professional overall.

You’re going to get more clicks on your MLS listings, Redfin and Zillow, meaning more leads.

There are a few other things that make them beneficial.

First, if you always use the same presets, that can in and of itself become a distinctive part of your brand and a way you set yourself apart. Your Instagram feed will look carefully curated and have consistency, which is visually appealing.

When you use presets, you can do bulk editing. If you had 200 photos of a property, for example, you don’t have to edit them all individually. Instead, you can apply your Lightroom preset to all of them and sync your settings. Then, from there, you might just need to make a few more minor adjustments.

You can also save money on a professional photographer, which may not be in your budget. Buying presets tends to be affordable—while the prices can vary depending on the creator, they’re usually around $30-$40 each.

If you want consistency, branding, simplicity, and time management in your real estate photos, it’s hard to argue against presets.

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