What does this preset actually do?

How to find your preset files

Lightroom Classic: right-click any preset in the Develop panel and choose Show in Finder (macOS) or Show in Explorer (Windows). You can also browse to the settings folder directly - on macOS it is ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/Settings, and on Windows %AppData%\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings.

If you bought a preset pack, the .xmp files are sitting in the zip you downloaded - you can inspect them before you install anything.

What the readings mean

A preset file lists far more than it changes. Lightroom writes the whole colour grid and half the effects panel into every preset, mostly as zeros, so a raw view of the file shows sixty settings when eight of them are doing the work. This tool only shows you a setting when it sits somewhere other than its Lightroom default - and it hides settings that depend on something switched off, like a grain size next to no grain, or a colour-grading hue with the saturation at zero.

Values are shown the way Lightroom shows them, so a +18 here is the +18 you would see on the slider. Tone curves are reported as the number of points on the curve rather than redrawn, because the shape only means something against a photo.

Is my preset uploaded anywhere?

No. The file is read in your browser with the standard file reader and parsed on the spot - there is no server call in this page, and nothing is stored. You can turn off your network connection and it still works. That also means the tool cannot see, keep, or share whatever you drop into it.

Made with these

The sample above is one of forty presets we give away free - four packs, ten looks each, built for Lightroom Classic. Grab the packs if you want something to test this on, or read the journal for how they were built.