Free Lightroom presets for travel photography (and how to use them well)

Travel photographs have a particular problem: you shoot them over days, in wildly different light, and then post them together. The frames are fine individually and incoherent as a set.

Grading is what fixes that, and you can start without spending anything. Our free pack includes three travel looks in both .xmp and .dng.

What travel light actually does

Three recurring failures, each with a cause:

Midday flatness. Overhead sun produces short shadows and low contrast at the exact tones you care about. Frames come back looking like snapshots because, tonally, they are.

Haze. Distance scatters light into your shadows. The result is washed and slightly blue, and no white balance correction fixes it because it is a contrast problem, not a temperature one.

Mixed ambient. Shade is blue, open sun is warm, interiors are whatever the bulbs are. Shot across one afternoon, the set has no consistent colour.

What a travel grade does about it

A good travel grade is doing three specific things:

1. Lifting warm channels through the midtones, so ochre, terracotta and skin in shade read as warm rather than grey.
2. Pulling blue down in the midtones, which is how you kill haze without crushing the whole frame.
3. Adding contrast selectively, mostly in the quarter-tone, where the detail in a painted wall or a distant ridge lives.

You can see this plotted on any of our pack pages, the blue curve sits visibly below the diagonal through the middle while red rides above it.

Making a set hold together

The grade is the easy part. Consistency is technique.

Correct white balance per frame, not per set. This feels backwards but it is the point. Neutralise each frame individually so they all start from the same place, then apply one grade across all of them. Applying one grade to frames with four different white balances is what produces an incoherent set.

Pick one grade per trip, not per photo. The temptation to use the moody one for the temple and the bright one for the beach is what destroys a set. One grade, small per-frame exposure adjustments.

Watch skin. Travel sets usually include people. A grade that makes a wall sing can make a face orange. Most packs include a skin-safe variant; use it when a person is the subject.

Getting the free pack

The free pack is three looks: one for midday, one for haze, one for golden hour. Both file formats, no account, no email required to download.

If you are on a phone and have never installed a preset, read the mobile install guide first, the free Lightroom app needs the DNG files, not the XMP ones.

When you want more

The free looks are genuinely usable and deliberately not crippled. If you want the full range, Kerala Gold and Chai Street are the two travel packs, built for warm architecture and for haze respectively.

But start free. A grade you have actually tested on your own photographs is worth more than a pack you bought on the strength of someone else’s samples.

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Written by the Graded By colour lab. Every pack ships both the desktop and the mobile preset file, plus this guide in print.