I built and sold presets for a while before deciding it wasn't worth my time, and the reason is the same reason most presets, mine included, disappoint people who buy them: a preset built and demonstrated on one specific lighting condition looks great on that exact condition and mediocre to bad everywhere else, and most buyers never realize that's the actual problem.
What a preset can and can't actually do
A preset is a fixed set of adjustments applied uniformly. It has no idea whether your source image is underexposed, backlit, or shot under warm tungsten versus cool overcast light, and it applies the same correction regardless. That's fine when the demo photos and your photos share similar lighting. It falls apart fast the moment they don't, which for most people shooting varied real-world conditions is most of the time.
How I actually use presets now
I still use presets, just differently than most tutorials suggest. Mine function as a starting point for global tone and color character, never as a finished edit, and I build in a habit of checking exposure and white balance manually before the preset even gets applied, correcting the base image to something closer to neutral first. The preset then has a consistent starting point to work from instead of trying to compensate for wildly different source exposures with one fixed formula.
- Correct exposure and white balance before applying any preset
- Treat a preset as a starting look, not a finished result
- Build separate presets for genuinely different lighting conditions, not one for everything
The batch editing habit that actually saves time
For a full event's worth of images, I now sort by lighting condition first, indoor tungsten, outdoor overcast, direct sun, before batch applying anything. It's an extra ten minutes of sorting up front that saves an hour of individually correcting images a mismatched preset made worse instead of better. Boring advice, and it's the difference between a batch edit that actually holds up and one a client quietly notices is inconsistent.