Photo Presets: What Sells and What Buyers Return

The photo presets that rank for this search are two different products wearing the same name. Wilde Presets and Lou & Marks sell collections at $9, ten presets each at Wilde, built to run on the free Lightroom mobile app with a phone photo. G-Presets sells packs at $95 to $129, twenty presets in the one I read, for RAW files only, on desktop only, and not at all on Lightroom Classic older than 12.5. That's 90 cents a preset against $4.75, and the price gap is the buyer, not the file.

What buyers return is written down too. All three shops refuse refunds once the files are downloaded, and G-Presets' policy, effective 8 August 2026, lists the reasons it won't accept, which is as close to a refund log as a seller will ever get to read. I've read all of it on 15 September 2026 and put the useful parts below.

Formats, the free-preset sites and the fee arithmetic on a $15 or $39 pack are already in free Lightroom presets, so this piece skips them.

Two Markets on One Results Page

The confusing thing about this search is that Google returns both markets and neither shop acknowledges the other exists.

The mobile market is Wilde and Lou & Marks. Both say their presets work with "the free Lightroom mobile app" and every version of desktop Lightroom, both ship DNG files for the phone alongside XMP for desktop, and both sell the individual collection at $9 with $30 struck through. Wilde's FAQ says the only gear required is "a camera phone and the FREE Lightroom mobile app". The buyer is someone with an Instagram feed and a phone.

The desktop market is G-Presets. Its Analog Days pack says, in its own notes, that the presets "are for RAW images only and are designed for desktop use (not mobile)". They need Lightroom Classic 12.5 or later, Lightroom CC 6.5 or later, or Camera Raw 15.5 or later, "as earlier versions do not support the required features", and the old lrtemplate format isn't included at all. The buyer is a wedding photographer with a camera and a subscription.

There's a third thing on the page that competes with the first market and not the second. VSCO's feature page says its app includes "fifteen of our most popular professional-grade photo filters for free", with a Pro tier for dozens more. A phone user deciding whether to pay $9 for ten presets is deciding against fifteen free ones in an app they may already have. A RAW shooter isn't.

The guide at position eight, a wedding photographer's tour of six preset makers she's used, is firmly in the second market and mentions no price for anything. The mobile shops are in the first and mention no camera. If you're deciding what to make, this is the first decision, and it's made before you touch a slider.

What the Three Shops Actually Ship

The shops' own product and policy pages, side by side, which nobody on this results page does.

Three things stand out for a seller. The mobile shops price the collection, not the preset, and $9 for ten is the going rate whatever the strike-through says. The desktop shop prices by the pack and states a version floor, which means it's using features the older Lightroom can't read, and it says so rather than fielding the support ticket. And only one of the three puts its licence terms where I could find them, which is a gap the reader can fill on their own listing in one sentence.

I'd add that G-Presets' before-and-after images are described as "a one-click edit, using identical white balance and exposure to highlight exactly how the presets enhance the image". That's a method statement, and it's the honest way to show a preset. The mobile shops show results without saying what else was done to get them.

The Strike-Through Multiples

Every price on the two mobile shops comes with a bigger number crossed out, and the multiples are worth writing down because they tell you what the shops think their buyer responds to.

The desktop shop discounts its bundle by a third and leaves single packs at full price. The mobile shops discount everything, all the time, by three to twenty-four times, and Wilde's own page gives two different "regular" figures for the same $97 product a few lines apart. I'm not going to tell you whether a permanent 90% sale is good practice, but I'll say that a new seller pricing a ten-preset mobile pack at $9 is matching the sale price of shops that call themselves number one, and pricing it at $30 is matching a number that was crossed out on every collection I loaded today.

For a desktop pack the reference is $95 for twenty presets. My own toolkits sit between $29 and $49, and that band is empty on this results page, which I read as a gap rather than a warning. Nobody on this page is selling a $39 RAW pack for a specific kind of light, and the wedding guide's whole story is a photographer moving between makers looking for exactly that.

What Buyers Return, From the Refund Pages

Three shops, three refund pages, one rule. Once the file is downloaded, no refund, with exceptions. Where they differ is what they've written down about the exceptions, and G-Presets has written the most.

Its policy lists what it will review. A double charge, a duplicate purchase, the wrong product delivered, access that can't be restored, corrupted files it can't replace, a billing error, or anything the law requires. Then it lists what it won't refund, and this list is the article. You changed your mind. You "do not like the editing style or results". Your "photographs do not look exactly like sample images". You bought the wrong product without their error. You "do not have compatible software or system requirements that were disclosed before purchase". The product went on sale after you bought it.

Read that as a seller and it's a list of the seven messages a preset shop gets, in the order the shop got tired of them. Wilde's FAQ adds four more from the mobile side, in the form of questions it chose to answer up front. Will it work with my skin tone. Do I have to buy again on a new phone. Why didn't I get the email. Can I share it with my photographer.

Notice that not one of these is "the preset is bad". The complaints are about fit, and fit is decided by what the listing said before the sale. Lou & Marks' policy makes the mechanism explicit by offering a full refund only on items "that have not been downloaded or accessed", which means the only window for a change of mind is the minute between paying and clicking.

Which Market a New Seller Can Enter

The mobile market's shops call themselves "#1 Best-Selling" in their page titles, both of them, and sell a ten-preset collection for $9 with a claimed regular price of $30. Entering it means competing at $9 against catalogues with dozens of $9 collections and an all-access bundle under $100. The buyer needs nothing but a phone and the free app, so there's no expertise barrier, which is why there's no price either.

The desktop market asks the buyer for a camera, RAW files, a current Lightroom subscription and $95. That's a smaller room with a higher floor, and the products in it are explicit about what they don't do. In my judgment it's the easier one to be new in. A pack built for one situation, indoor receptions or overcast beach light or whatever you shoot, has a reason to exist next to a general-purpose $129 pack. A $9 phone filter doesn't have a reason to exist next to forty other $9 phone filters.

Either way, decide which market before you build, because the file formats, the sample images, the version floor and the price all follow from it. A DNG made from a phone photo is the wrong product for a RAW shooter and an XMP that needs Classic 12.5 is the wrong product for a phone. The rest of the shop, where to list it and when you get paid, is the same for both and it's in Gumroad alternatives.

Questions

What are the best photography presets? The wedding guide ranking here names six makers and says the answer changed every time her style did, which is the honest version. On this results page the buyer with a phone gets Wilde or Lou & Marks at $9, and the buyer with RAW files gets G-Presets at $95. Best is which of those two you are.

Is it worth buying photo presets? At $9 for ten mobile presets, the risk is a coffee. At $95 the shop's own policy says no refund if your photos don't match the samples, so worth it depends on whether your light matches theirs, and the before-and-after method they describe is the thing to check before paying.

What are the best free photo presets? ON1 lists eleven free packs with no card required, VSCO's app includes fifteen filters free, and the free-site audit with what each asks for is in free Lightroom presets.

What are presets for photos? Saved slider positions. Wilde's FAQ calls them "high quality filters", G-Presets calls them a way to turn "unedited RAW files into polished" images, and both are describing the same small text file applied to a different input.

Do most photographers use presets? I don't have a number and I'd distrust one. The wedding photographer's guide describes a career of using them, and three shops ranking on the first page of a generic search suggests a lot of people buy them. Whether most professionals do is not something any page here can show.

How do I apply presets to photos? On mobile, the shops ship DNG files for the phone rather than XMP, and both say an install guide comes with the purchase, a video at Wilde and documents at Lou & Marks. On desktop, ON1's page says to click the plus icon, choose Import Presets and select the XMP or lrtemplate file. Adobe's own pages on this wouldn't load for me today, so check theirs for the current menu names.

Is selling stock photos a better use of the same camera? Different maths, per-file rather than per-pack, and it's worked through in selling photos as stock images.

What I'd Do

Pick the desktop market and one lighting situation. Twenty presets at $39, RAW only, with the Lightroom version floor in the first line of the listing and before-and-after pairs that say what was and wasn't touched.

Write the refund page before the first sale, and put the nine rows of the return table on the listing as plain sentences. The shops that rank learned each of those the hard way. You get to read them for nothing.

Then don't strike through a price you never charged. The wedding photographer in the results is looking for a maker to trust, and the $2,350 crossed out on a $97 bundle is the kind of thing she'll notice.