Should You Sell Presets or Editing Actions

I get asked fairly often whether I sell presets or editing actions, since it's genuinely one of the more obvious ways photographers try to turn a distinctive visual style into some form of passive income, and it's genuinely a question I've thought through quite carefully rather than simply dismissed out of hand. The honest answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no, and it's genuinely changed somewhat over time as I've watched the broader market for this kind of product continue to evolve.

What I can offer is a genuinely considered breakdown of the tradeoffs, based on real, ongoing conversations with photographers who've genuinely built successful preset businesses and others who tried it and eventually abandoned the idea. If you want the genuinely fuller picture of how I think about diversified income streams as part of a complete, well-rounded photography business, the Adventure Travel Photographer's Playbook covers this specific question alongside the rest of the overall business strategy.

Why This Question Keeps Coming Up

Presets and editing actions are genuinely appealing precisely because they promise something most other forms of photography income simply don't offer in the same way: real, meaningful scalability. A print typically sells once, a licensing deal has a defined scope, but a preset pack can theoretically sell to an unlimited number of buyers without requiring additional time from the photographer after the initial product is built, which is a genuinely attractive proposition for anyone tired of trading hours directly for income.

That scalability is real, but it's also the part of the pitch that gets oversold the most in online discussions about passive income for photographers. The actual path to meaningful preset revenue involves far more ongoing work than the word passive suggests, and understanding that gap between the promise and the reality is the first real step toward deciding whether this is worth pursuing.

I've watched enough photographers get pulled in by the scalability pitch alone, without examining the actual work required to make it succeed, that I think it's worth being unusually direct about the gap between the appealing theory and the more demanding reality of actually building this kind of product successfully.

I also think it's worth naming why the passive income framing spreads so easily in the first place: it's a genuinely appealing idea, work once, get paid repeatedly, and that appeal makes people less likely to scrutinize the actual mechanics behind a specific success story before assuming it will translate directly to their own situation. A photographer sharing an impressive preset revenue number rarely shares the years of audience-building that preceded it, which leaves an incomplete picture that makes the whole endeavor look easier and more purely passive than it typically turns out to be in practice.

What It Actually Takes to Build a Successful Preset Business

A successful preset or action business requires more than a distinctive editing style, it requires genuine marketing infrastructure: an audience large enough to sell to, a clear brand identity tied specifically to the visual style being sold, and ongoing content that continues demonstrating the results the presets are supposed to produce. Without that infrastructure already in place, even an excellent, genuinely distinctive set of presets is likely to sell poorly.

Every single photographer I personally know who's built a genuinely successful preset business already had a sizable, engaged audience well before launching the product, never after. The preset launch amplified an existing relationship with an audience rather than creating one from scratch, which is a meaningfully different starting position than a photographer with a smaller following hoping a strong product alone will build the audience needed to sell it.

That sequencing matters enormously and is easy to get backwards. Building the audience first, then the product, tends to work; building the product first and hoping the audience follows tends to disappoint, based on what I've consistently observed across photographers who've tried both approaches with genuinely comparable product quality.

The clearest example I've seen involved two photographers with strikingly similar editing styles, launching genuinely comparable products within the same year, one to an audience they'd spent three years actively building and the other to a much smaller, newer following assembled mostly in the months leading up to launch. The revenue gap between the two launches was enormous, and it tracked audience readiness far more closely than it tracked any meaningful difference in the actual quality or distinctiveness of the presets themselves.

The Ongoing Work That Gets Underestimated

Beyond the initial audience requirement, a preset business requires real ongoing maintenance: updating products as camera technology and editing software evolve, creating new content that continues showcasing results, responding to customer support questions, and periodically refreshing the product line as visual trends shift over time. None of that is passive, even once the initial product itself is built and ready to sell.

Photographers who treat a preset launch as a purely one-time project, build it, sell it, move on and forget about it, tend to see revenue decline steadily after an initial launch spike, since the product needs continued marketing attention to keep selling at a meaningful volume over time. The ones who treat it as an ongoing product line, with regular updates and continued promotion, see much more durable results.

Customer support in particular tends to be underestimated by photographers who haven't sold a digital product before. Buyers run into installation issues, compatibility questions across different software versions, and confusion about how to adapt a preset to their own images, all of which generate a steady stream of support requests that someone needs to actually respond to. That workload scales with sales volume in a way that can start to feel less like passive income and more like a genuine second job once a product line reaches any meaningful scale.

Weighing It Against Prints and Licensing

Compared to prints and licensing, presets sit at a different point on the effort-versus-scalability spectrum. Prints and licensing both trade directly on existing images and existing client relationships, requiring relatively little additional infrastructure beyond what a working photographer already has. Presets require building an entirely separate product and marketing system essentially from the ground up.

For a photographer already stretched thin managing client work, that additional infrastructure requirement is a real cost worth weighing honestly against the potential upside, rather than assuming presets are simply free additional income layered on top of existing efforts with no meaningful tradeoff against other priorities.

Licensing in particular tends to pay disproportionately well relative to the effort involved once a relationship with the right kind of client is established, since a single licensing agreement can generate meaningful revenue from images that already exist, requiring essentially no additional production time beyond the original shoot. That efficiency is hard for a preset business to match, especially in its early years before an audience and product line have had time to mature into something genuinely self-sustaining without constant new investment of time and attention.

Why I've Personally Held Off, For Now

I haven't launched a preset line myself, not because I don't think it could work, but because building it properly would require redirecting real time and attention away from client work and the other content efforts that are currently producing stronger, more reliable returns for the business as it stands today.

That calculation could change as the business evolves, and I revisit it periodically rather than treating the decision as permanently closed. But for now, the honest math doesn't favor adding a preset business on top of everything else already competing for the same limited hours in a given week.

I check that math roughly once a year, comparing the realistic revenue a preset line might generate against what the same hours would likely produce if invested in deepening existing client relationships or expanding into an adjacent service. So far, the client-focused investment has consistently produced a better return, though I recognize that calculation will shift over time as the business, the audience, and the broader preset market itself all continue to evolve in ways I can't fully predict from where things currently stand.

Who I Think Presets Actually Make Sense For

Based on what I've observed, presets make the most sense for photographers who already have a large, engaged audience specifically drawn to their visual style, who have some spare capacity for ongoing product maintenance and marketing, and who are looking to diversify income beyond client work rather than replace it entirely with a single new revenue stream.

They make less sense for photographers still building their core audience and client base, since the infrastructure required to sell presets successfully competes directly with the time needed to build the audience and reputation that client work depends on in the first place, at a stage where that foundational work should probably take priority.

There's also a middle group worth mentioning: photographers with a solid, established audience who genuinely enjoy the product-building and marketing side of the business as much as the photography itself. For that specific group, the additional work required isn't purely a cost to be minimized, it's work they'd likely find genuinely engaging on its own terms, which changes the calculation meaningfully compared to a photographer who would experience that same work purely as an unwelcome distraction from the photography they actually want to be doing.

The Pricing and Positioning Mistakes I've Seen Most Often

Among photographers who do launch preset products, the most common mistake I've observed is underpricing, treating a preset pack as a minor add-on product rather than a genuine reflection of the years of editing skill and experimentation that actually went into developing the style being sold. Underpriced presets tend to attract buyers who aren't genuinely invested in the outcome, producing weaker word-of-mouth and lower perceived value than a more confidently priced product would have generated from the same underlying audience, given comparable actual quality behind the product itself.

The second common mistake is positioning presets as a shortcut to a specific photographer's exact look, rather than as a genuinely useful starting point that still requires the buyer's own judgment and adjustment. Overpromising on how automatic the results will be tends to produce disappointed buyers and negative reviews once they discover that presets alone don't replace real editing skill and attention.

A related mistake is failing to clearly communicate what a preset actually does and doesn't do before a purchase, leaving buyers to discover the real scope of the product only after they've already paid for it. The photographers who handle this best include honest, unedited before-and-after examples across a range of lighting conditions and subjects, setting an accurate expectation upfront rather than only showcasing the single best-case result the presets happened to produce under ideal conditions.

What a Realistic Revenue Expectation Actually Looks Like

For photographers considering this path, it's worth setting realistic revenue expectations grounded in actual reported numbers from other photographers, rather than the more dramatic, cherry-picked success stories that tend to circulate publicly. Most preset businesses generate modest, supplementary income rather than replacing a full photography income on their own, at least in the first several years of building the product line.

That's not a reason to dismiss the idea entirely, supplementary income is genuinely valuable, but it is a reason to approach the decision with realistic expectations rather than the inflated promises that sometimes surround this kind of product in online discussions about passive income for creators.

Talking to photographers a few years into running an established preset business, the ones who describe it as genuinely worthwhile consistently frame it as one solid piece of a diversified income picture rather than a dramatic windfall that transformed their business overnight. That more modest, honest framing is a far more reliable guide for setting expectations than the occasional standout success story that tends to circulate the widest specifically because it's unusual rather than representative.

How I'd Approach It If I Decided to Launch One

If I did eventually decide to build a preset line, I'd approach it the way the most successful photographers I know did: starting with a smaller, tightly focused product built around a genuinely distinctive style already resonating with an existing audience, rather than a large, generic collection meant to appeal broadly to as many potential buyers as possible.

I'd also plan for the ongoing marketing and maintenance commitment from the very start, rather than treating the initial launch as the finish line, since the photographers who sustain meaningful revenue from this kind of product consistently treat it as an ongoing part of the business rather than a one-time project completed and then left alone.

I'd also make sure the decision to launch was grounded in real evidence rather than optimism alone, testing genuine audience interest before building the full product, perhaps through a waitlist or a small pilot offering to a subset of the existing audience, rather than investing months of development time purely on the assumption that interest would materialize once the finished product was ready to sell. That kind of validation step, however unglamorous, would likely save far more time than it costs if the honest signal came back weaker than hoped.

Reflection Questions

1. Do you have an audience genuinely large enough and engaged enough to actually support a preset launch, or would you effectively be building the audience and the product at exactly the same time?
2. Have you accounted honestly for the real ongoing maintenance and continued marketing a preset business genuinely requires, well beyond just the initial product build itself?
3. Are you pricing your own editing style and hard-earned expertise with genuine confidence, or quietly underpricing it out of lingering uncertainty about its real value?
4. What specifically would need to be true about your current business for a preset line to genuinely make more sense right now than it might have made a full year ago?

If you're weighing this decision as part of a broader income strategy, the Adventure Photographer's Playbook covers how I think about diversifying revenue without spreading effort too thin, alongside the platform and audience-building work that any successful product line ultimately depends on.

Dalton Johnson is a professional adventure and editorial photographer with over a decade of experience creating images on all seven continents. His client work includes Patagonia, GoPro, Arc'teryx, Four Seasons, Nike, Rivian, Big Agnes, Ford Bronco, and 160+ other brands. He runs Dalton Johnson Media as a full-service studio, from pre-production through post and distribution.

None of this is meant to talk anyone out of the idea entirely, only to make sure the decision gets made with clear eyes rather than borrowed enthusiasm from someone else's very different circumstances, audience size, and timeline.

Ultimately, the decision comes down to an honest read of your own current priorities and current capacity, not to whether presets have worked well for someone else entirely, with a very different audience, a very different timeline, and a very different set of existing business commitments already competing for the same limited hours in any given week.