How to Install Lightroom Presets in Lightroom 4 Tutorial

Hey everybody, Randy McKown here and in this Lightroom tutorial I'm going to be showing how to install Lightroom Presets by importing them directly into Adobe Lightroom. This method will work for installing Lightroom Presets that you've downloaded from myself or from any other website. When you download Lightroom presets they will most likely always come in a zip file. You can see I have 2 presets here in my download folder. The first thing we need to do is extract the presets from these archives. Double clicking the zip file will extract it's contents and we can see that this is a Lightroom preset by it's icon and from the extension LRTEMPLATE. The other zip file is a bit different. You can see that this one contained a folder and inside you'll see this was actually a set of presets delivered in one single download. You'll need to come back over to Adobe Lightroom and make sure that you're in the Develop module. Below the navigator you will find Presets. Look inside and you can see I already have some presets that came installed with Lightroom by default. Lightroom Presets are a great way to compliment your workflow and over time you're going to end up downloading a lot of them. This means that we need to keep this area organized and we do that using folders. To create a new folder right click anywhere in this area right here and select New Folder. I like to organize my presets by the type of effect that they create so I'm just going to call this one vintage. Click the Create button. Now we're ready to import our Lightroom presets into this folder. Right click on the folder name and choose import. Navigate to the folder you downloaded your presets to and simply double click on the preset file. We can see the Lightroom Preset has been installed into Lightroom within the vintage folder and it also went ahead and applied the preset to my current image. Now remember my download that had 2 Lightroom presets in a folder. We can actually import both of those presets at the exact same time. Let's right click and choose import again. This time we're going to select both of the presets and click the import button. We can see that both presets have been imported into Lightroom. Now, I'd like to point out that if we look in our history we can see that both presets were applied to this image in the order that they were imported. If you're in the middle of working on a photo you probably don't want to stop and import a bunch of presets. First, deselect that image or select another image that you haven't started working on, import your presets and then continue about what you were doing. Let's take a look at where these Lightroom Presets are stored. We can see that these are not the original files in my download folder. Lightroom made copies of them during the import. That means we can safely delete the files from our download folder. Now of course you will want to save the original zip files by storing them someplace safe like on a completely different hard drive. Just in case you ever need to reinstall Lightroom, you want to be able to easily reinstall the Lightroom presets from your backup drive. Well that's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did please go ahead and stop what you're doing, subscribe to my youtube channel, give this video a thumbs up and don't forget you can also follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/randymckown Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.