10+ Best Free Lightroom Presets for Landscape Photography

Lightroom presets can help you achieve a specific mood, evoke emotions, and add unique photo effects to your images with just a few clicks. By using presets, you can streamline your editing process, saving time while creating a consistent style across your photos.

Presets help to bring out the natural beauty of a landscape scene. The right preset can enhance the colors of a sunset or sunrise, bringing out the warmth and beauty of the scene. A preset can also create a moody and dramatic look, adding contrast and shadow to your shot.

They can help evoke specific emotions in the viewer. For example, a soft and dreamy preset can create a sense of calm and serenity, while a bold and vibrant preset can invoke a sense of excitement and adventure.

We explore ten exceptional free Lightroom presets to elevate the beauty of your outdoor photography. These presets provide a range of unique styles, each ideally suited to enhance those picturesque moments you’ve captured.

Note: These free Adobe Lightroom outdoor presets are used for Adobe Lightroom Classic. They are each packaged with .xmp files. Check out our instructions to install these presets below.

What is Landscape Photography?

Landscape photography is a photography genre that focuses on capturing the natural beauty and vastness of outdoor environments. It encompasses images of various landscapes, such as mountains, forests, oceans, deserts, and urban scenes.

Landscape photography aims to convey the sense of space, grandeur, and unique features of the natural world. Key aspects of landscape photography include:

1. Scenic Vistas: Landscape photographers often seek out breathtaking vistas and panoramic views to capture the beauty and scale of the environment.
2. Natural Elements: Elements like mountains, hills, rivers, lakes, trees, and skies play essential roles in landscape compositions.
3. Golden Hour Lighting: Photographers often shoot during the “golden hours” of sunrise and sunset when the soft, warm light creates a magical atmosphere.
4. Foreground & Depth: A strong composition often involves including a foreground element to provide depth and a sense of scale in the image.
5. Weather & Seasons: Different weather conditions and changing seasons can dramatically alter the mood and appearance of landscapes, offering diverse photographic opportunities.
6. Rule of Thirds & Leading Lines: The rule of thirds and leading lines are techniques commonly used to guide the viewer’s eye through the image.
7. Long Exposures: Long exposure techniques are used to capture motion in water, clouds, and other dynamic elements, resulting in ethereal and surreal effects.
8. Patience & Planning: Landscape photographers often wait for the perfect lighting conditions and weather and may return to the exact location multiple times to capture the ideal shot.
9. Post-Processing: Post-processing techniques are used to enhance colors, contrast, and details while maintaining the natural beauty of the landscape.
10. Environmental Conservation: Landscape photographers often emphasize the importance of preserving and respecting the environment they photograph.

Landscape photography celebrates the beauty of the natural world and allows viewers to experience the awe-inspiring scenes that our planet offers. It’s a genre that requires a keen eye for composition, a deep connection with nature, and a passion for capturing the majesty of the great outdoors.

Our Favorite Preset Collection for Landscape Photographers

Top Landscape, Nature & Outdoor Lightroom Presets

Lushify Free Lightroom Preset

Are your colors looking watered down? Lushify is the perfect starting point. I love presets that make the photo appear the same way I remember the scene, which is vivid and rich with memories. Lushify helps you do just that in the post-processing stage.

High Tide Free Lightroom Preset

With a bit of a faded effect, High Tide is a fantastic preset to give your landscapes a retro look. This preset includes a magic balance between enriching the image’s tone and fading to a vintage style. Think of this as the ideal preset for a nostalgic look back at your vacation landscapes.

HQ Landscape Lightroom Presets

Anything that helps to speed up processing and editing has to be worth your attention. This collection gives you twelve one-click presets for improving your landscape shots.

One Click Wonder Lightroom Preset

Sometimes, you might not know where to start while styling an image. That’s only natural because you can adjust an image in many ways. One Click Wonder helps to give you a headstart for these adjustments. Use this preset as a launching point to upgrade your image from RAW to remarkable.

30 Travel & Landscape Presets

This Lightroom collection offers 30 presets that allow you to quickly add some lovely and subtle effects to your travel photos. Gentle effects but such a powerful end result.

Trey’s Lightroom Presets

Trey Ratcliff pioneered the use of HDR photography in landscapes, and his influence continues today. These presets aren’t your everyday neutral styles. They’re designed with a high key, high detail, and contrasty style. Tap into this pack of free landscape presets for unforgettable scenes.

Green Hills Free Lightroom Preset

Green is a dominant color in many landscape images, and this preset brings out the most of them. This preset is best used as a style that turns up the volume on green hues to make them take center stage in your landscape.

Warm Light Free Lightroom Preset

As the name implies, this preset casts sunshiney hues across the image. If your photos lack the inspiration of the original scene, try this out as a first pass. It’s an easy option to warm up an otherwise dull photo.

A Seaside Story Lightroom Preset

For thousands of years, people have been drawn to the sea for vacation. That includes capturing stunning photos of oceans and lakes. A Seaside Story brings out the blue hues in those images to make the most of any image with water, with just one click.

Free Black & White Lightroom Presets for Landscapes

Every list of landscape presets needs a black and white option. This one fits the bill perfectly for a highly contrasted, monochrome look. The link above has ten styles you can use to test out black and white transformations.

Merigold Free Lightroom Preset

Not every landscape is dominated by green hues. Beautiful landscapes also include plenty of brown earth elements. These can still be the site of stunning sights, and Merigold warms those scenes perfectly. Try this out on your favorite landscapes with rocky elements.

Lightroom Profiles Landscape Preset

Rounding out our selection, this preset is another excellent way to take a file from flat to finished. With an increase in clarity and enhanced color, your landscapes will come to life.

How to Download & Install Presets in Lightroom

Installing and using landscape presets in Lightroom streamlines your editing workflow, allowing you to enhance the beauty of your landscape photography with ease. Here’s how to install presets in Lightroom:

1. Download Presets: Download landscape presets from a trusted source and unzip the files.
2. Open Lightroom: Launch Lightroom and go to the Develop module.
3. Create Presets Folder: In the left panel, right-click an existing preset folder and create a new one named Landscape Presets.
4. Import Presets: Right-click the new folder, choose Import, and select the .xmp preset files you downloaded.
5. Apply Presets: Open a landscape photo, access the Presets panel, and click a landscape preset to apply it.
6. Adjust Settings: Modify settings to match the specific lighting and conditions of each landscape.
7. Batch Edit: Apply the same preset to multiple landscape images for a consistent look.

Improving Landscape Photos with Lightroom Presets

Enhancing landscape photos is a breeze with Lightroom. The application lets you adjust brightness, contrast, and colors, breathing life into your scenic shots.

You can make skies more vibrant, forests greener, and lakes bluer. Lightroom’s user-friendly interface and simple sliders make it accessible even for beginners. Elevate your landscape photography game by mastering this essential tool.

If you’re new to the application, consider exploring our collection of Lightroom tutorials.