Every Lightroom preset here is an .xmp file, and an .xmp is a plain-text list of develop settings. That makes a question answerable that normally is not: across a whole catalogue of festival and concert presets, what do they actually do?
All forty published files were read and tallied. Not described, not sampled — parsed, with the same reader that builds each preset page.
The tonal shape all forty share
| Slider | Files that set it | Median | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exposure | 32 / 40 | +0.12 EV | −0.28 to +0.50 |
| Contrast | 32 / 40 | +25 | −15 to +42 |
| Highlights | 32 / 40 | −18 | −69 to −3 |
| Shadows | 32 / 40 | +12 | −5 to +43 |
| Whites | 28 / 40 | +8 | −8 to +33 |
| Blacks | 32 / 40 | −19 | −38 to +8 |
Three of those columns are close to unanimous, and together they describe one move:
- Every preset that touches Highlights pulls them down. All 32 of 32. Not most — all. The gentlest is −3, the hardest −69.
- Shadows go up in 30 of 32.
- Blacks go down in 27 of 32, and contrast up in 31 of 32.
Thirty of the forty files do the first two in the same preset: highlights down, shadows up. That is an S-curve with the top rolled off — open the shadows, protect the highlights, put the contrast back with the Contrast slider and a deepened black point.
Which is exactly what the light at a show demands. A stage is a handful of very bright sources against a mostly dark room, and the raw file arrives with blown highlights on the performer and nothing readable in the crowd. Pull the highlights, lift the shadows, and the black point stops the result looking flat.
What that means when you choose one. If your problem is a scene already lit flat — an afternoon set, an overcast field — a preset built for this shape works against you, because there are no highlights to recover and lifting the shadows only removes the contrast that was left. Sort by what your frame is doing, not by the name of the look.
Vibrance, not saturation
| Slider | Files | Median | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibrance | 32 / 40 | +23 | −9 to +40 |
| Clarity | 27 / 40 | +18 | −4 to +26 |
| Saturation | 27 / 40 | +10 | −17 to +22 |
| Texture | 22 / 40 | +9 | +3 to +15 |
| Dehaze | 25 / 40 | +3 | −3 to +12 |
Of the 27 files that set both, 26 push Vibrance further than Saturation — a median +23 against +10.
That is not a stylistic tic, it is the correct tool for the subject. Saturation raises every colour by the same amount; Vibrance weights the increase towards the less-saturated ones and protects skin. At a show the saturated colours are already at the limit — a red wash on a performer is often outside Rec.709 or sRGB before you touch anything — so a global Saturation lift pushes them further out of gamut and flattens them into a single block of red, while faces go orange. Vibrance leaves those alone and works on everything else.
The colour mixer is doing more than the tone sliders
| Band | Files that move it |
|---|---|
| Red, Green, Blue, Orange | 40 / 40 |
| Yellow | 38 / 40 |
| Aqua | 37 / 40 |
| Magenta, Purple | 35 / 40 |
Every single file touches Red, Green, Blue and Orange — hue, saturation or luminance. Only 32 of 40 set a single tone slider, so the mixer is the more consistently used panel.
Orange is the interesting one: in a portrait it is largely skin, so a preset that moves Orange is deciding what skin looks like, whatever else it claims to do. If a look is wrong on faces but right on the stage, that band is the first place to check.
Beyond the mixer: 26 of 40 carry a tone curve, 32 of 40 apply colour grading to shadows or highlights, 22 add a vignette, and 17 add grain.
Five presets hand white balance back to your camera
Five of the forty set WhiteBalance to a named mode — "As Shot" — rather than "Custom". For those, Lightroom keeps whatever white balance the camera recorded and ignores the temperature and tint values that are also sitting in the file.
That is a deliberate choice by whoever made them, and a defensible one at a show: stage lighting changes colour every few seconds, so a fixed Kelvin value that suits one song is wrong for the next. It does mean the preset will not neutralise a colour cast for you.
Each preset page here states which of the two it is, read from the file rather than assumed.
A preset is not a LUT
They are different files doing different jobs, and the catalogue keeps them apart for that reason.
A preset is a set of Lightroom slider positions. It is parametric — every value stays live and adjustable after you apply it, and it acts on the raw file before demosaic decisions are finalised.
A LUT is a lookup table: a fixed grid of input colour to output colour, baked. Nothing inside it is adjustable afterwards; you can only reduce how much of it is applied.
That is why Lightroom will not load a .cube as a preset. It can use one — converted into a camera profile through Photoshop's Camera Raw, a one-time job — but a profile sits underneath the sliders rather than setting them. The Lightroom page has the conversion steps, and the Photoshop page covers the Color Lookup adjustment layer, which does take a .cube directly.
Sources
Every figure on this page was produced by reading the 40 published .xmp files with middleware/presetprofile.js — the same parser that renders the "What this preset adjusts" section on each preset page — and tallying the results. "Files that set it" counts a slider present and non-zero. Medians are the middle value of the files that set that slider, not of all forty. The colour-mixer count treats a band as touched if its hue, saturation or luminance is non-zero. Read on 24 August 2026, against the catalogue at /presets.