Change the look of a photo with Adjustment Presets

Quickly apply Adjustment Presets and make them your own.

Published December 17, 2025

00:01

Introduction

Right now I'm going to show you how to give your image a stylish look in a couple of clicks using the powerfully simple Adjustment Presets.

Hi, I'm Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE, and today I'm going to show you how to use Adjustment Presets to apply powerful tone and color adjustments to your image.

You can get the looks for your design with just a few clicks.

All the settings are saved in the Presets and can be applied with a simple click.

You also have access to the adjustments, so you can modify and change the settings to suit your image.

Let's get started.

We're going to go to the Adjustments panel.

00:35

Exploring and previewing adjustment presets

If you don't see the Adjustments panel, just choose Window, Adjustments.

At the top you'll see Single adjustments.

We could either scroll down or collapse this panel and go to Presets.

You'll see More, click on there, and now we see all the Presets.

As you roll over these Presets, you can see how they're going to affect the image.

If we want to apply them, we click on them.

Let's use the Sunshine one from Portraits,

01:08

Applying and stacking multiple presets

and this will give us that nice desert look that we're wanting for our image.

So let's click to apply it.

And notice it creates a new adjustment layer with the settings from that Preset.

Let's add a second Preset.

If we go down under Creative, let's click on the Color Pop.

And once again it creates an adjustment layer.

Some Presets contain more than one adjustment.

01:38

Fine-tuning preset settings and opacity

Let's click on the adjustment.

And if we want to change it, go up to the Properties panel.

Let's increase the Vibrance about +97.

And let's also increase the Saturation to about +33 to give us a really strong effect.

If this effect is a little too strong, you can adjust it using the Opacity.

By adjusting the Opacity it maintains the same balance between the settings, but we can adjust how intense we want it.

Maybe we want to save these new settings as a brand-new Preset.

02:10

Saving and reusing custom adjustment presets

It's more intense, plus we have the two stacked together.

So let's select them all.

We're going to click on the top, hold the Shift key and click on the bottom.

Now let's go under the Adjustments and let's scroll to the top and choose Back to view all.

What we want to do is go down to where it says Your presets, and this is where we can save our own.

To create a Preset of all the selected layers, simply click on the + button.

Why don't we call it sunbaked and then click Save?

If you want to delete any of these adjustment layers, all you need to do is select them and hit the Delete key or drag them into the Trash.

Let's reapply it from our Preset.

There's the Preset that we created, sunbaked.

Notice as we roll over, we see it, click and it applies these adjustments with all the settings that we saved in our Preset.

As you can see, Adjustment Presets are easy to use, and you have the flexibility to change any of the settings.

They're a great way for you to stylize your photos or to explore different adjustments in Photoshop.

Note: Stock assets provided are for practice purposes only. See terms.

What you'll learn

Apply one or more Adjust presets to an image

In the Adjustments panel, hover over different Adjustment Presets to preview them on your image. When you find one you want to apply, just click it. This adds one or more adjustment layers with preset values to your Layers panel. You can change the settings of any of those adjustment layers for a custom result.

Create your own custom preset

You can save any combination of adjustment layers and their settings as a custom Adjustment preset to apply to other images in the future.

Instruction by: Colin Smith
Adobe Stock Contributors: Buyanskyy Production

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