How to sell presets on Instagram

If people ask how you edit your photographs, you already have something to sell. A preset pack is the answer to that question in a form somebody can buy, and it costs you nothing to make a second copy.

Step 1: Build the pack

Three to six presets is the right size. Fewer feels thin, more is a decision the buyer has to make every time they open their photographs.

Give them names that describe the result, like Golden Hour, Overcast, Deep Green. A pack of presets called Preset 1 to Preset 6 makes the buyer do the work of remembering which is which.

Export in the formats people actually use: DNG files for the free Lightroom mobile app, and XMP for desktop Lightroom. Including both means one product suits everybody, and it saves you answering the same question every week.

Step 2: Put the whole thing in one file

Zip the presets together with a short install guide, one PDF page per platform, with screenshots. Most refund requests for presets come from somebody who could not install them rather than somebody who disliked the look, so the install guide is part of the product rather than an extra.

Step 3: Show the before and after

This is the whole sales page. Put a pair of images on the page for each preset, straight out of the camera and after. Use your own photographs, and use ordinary ones: a preset that transforms an already beautiful photograph proves less than one that rescues a flat afternoon.

Say what the pack suits. Presets built for warm outdoor light will disappoint somebody photographing food indoors, and saying so up front earns more trust than it costs in sales.

Step 4: Price it

Presets sit at the affordable end of digital products, which is the point: they are an impulse buy for somebody who has just watched your reel. Price so that saying yes takes no thought.

You can raise it later, and a pack that sells steadily at a comfortable price will earn more than one that sells occasionally at an ambitious one. More on pricing here.

Step 5: Sell it in your posts

The content that sells presets is the content you were making anyway. Post a before and after. Post a reel of you applying it to three photographs in a row. Answer the question when somebody asks how you edit, properly, and say the pack is in your bio.

Then put one link in your bio pointing at the page. Here is where that field is.

Put the same link on YouTube

A tutorial showing your edit from start to finish is the single best thing you can make for selling presets, and YouTube is where people go looking for exactly that. Somebody searching for how to get a particular look is much closer to buying than somebody who came across a reel.

The link goes in the video description, where it stays clickable for as long as the video exists. That is the practical difference between YouTube and a story: a story sells for a day, a tutorial keeps selling for years, and the same page address works in both.

Pin a comment with the link as well. Plenty of people watch without ever opening the description.

Selling LUTs and masking presets

Once a preset pack is selling, there are two products you can make from the same work. Both carry a higher price than a basic pack, because both do something the buyer would find hard to do themselves.

Masking presets

A plain preset applies the same change to the whole photograph. A masking preset applies changes to part of it: lifting the subject, deepening the sky, or shifting one colour range without touching the rest.

Colour range masking is the one worth understanding, because it is what separates a good pack from a cheap one. It targets a specific colour and adjusts only that, so you can push greens towards olive while leaving skin exactly where it was. Doing that by hand on every photograph is slow and takes a good eye, which is precisely why people will pay for it done once and saved.

The catch is compatibility. Masks need a reasonably recent version of Lightroom, and older versions can ignore them or apply them oddly. Say the version requirement on your page and in the install guide, plainly. A buyer who learns this after paying is where a refund request comes from, and it costs you nothing to say up front.

LUTs, for video

A LUT is a look up table: the same idea as a preset, in the format video editors read. Yours would be a CUBE file, which works in the major desktop editors and in most of the phone apps people cut reels in.

The buyers are video creators, and a good number of them are on YouTube grading footage for every video they publish. That is a different audience from your photograph buyers and often a more committed one, because they will use your look on everything they make rather than on one post.

Two things to say on the page, because both cause support messages otherwise. Say whether the LUT is built for log footage or for standard footage, since a LUT made for one looks wrong on the other. And say that a LUT sets the colour rather than fixing the exposure, so footage should be reasonably exposed before it goes on.

How to price and package them

Sell each on its own, and sell all three together at a saving. The bundle is the easiest extra revenue available to you, because somebody buying it has already decided they like your look.

If you only make one of the two, make the LUT pack. It reaches an audience your preset pack cannot, and the work is largely translating a look you have already built.