Today’s Question: Is it possible to see which specific adjustments are included in a Develop preset in Lightroom Classic?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Sort of. If you want to review a preset you created yourself, you can view the contents of the XMP file that is created when you save a preset. Otherwise, the only option would be to apply the preset to an image that doesn’t have any adjustments applied and review the adjustment settings to find those that changed from the default value.
More Detail: There isn’t a built-in feature in Lightroom Classic that will summarize the adjustments included in a Develop preset. But there are a couple of ways you could determine what the preset includes.
If you created the preset in Lightroom Classic you can right-click on that preset and choose Show in Finder (Macintosh) or Show in Explorer (Windows) from the popup menu. Then open the highlighted file with a text editor, such as TextEdit on Macintosh or Notepad on Windows. The saved preset is an XMP file that isn’t structured in a way that is particularly easy to read. However, if you scroll through you’ll find the names of the various adjustment settings with numeric values showing what the saved adjustment was set to. This can be a little tedious, but it does enable you to review the adjustments included in the saved preset.
The other option would be to select an image that doesn’t have any adjustments applied to it, or click the Reset button at the bottom of the right panel in the Develop module to reset to the default settings. Then apply the applicable preset and review all adjustments to see which had been changed from the default value.
