How to Make Your Own Cinematic Lightroom Presets

If you want to give your night shots that moody teal-and-orange movie look, you could hunt for the right Lightroom preset pack. But the presets that actually fit your photos — your city, your lighting, your taste — are the ones you make yourself.

This guide shows you how to build your own cinematic color grading tool in Auto, so the look is tuned to exactly what you shoot.

Why build your own instead of downloading presets

Searching “how to create your own presets in Lightroom” usually lands you in menus, or comparing preset marketplaces where a pack looks great on someone else’s beach photo and flat on your street scene. That’s the honest tradeoff with generic presets: they’re built for an average photo, not yours.

With Auto, you describe the grade you want, snap or load a photo, and it builds you a personal mini-app — a Frame — around that exact look. It takes minutes, and every slider is one you asked for.

Build it in Auto: quick walkthrough

1. Open Auto and describe your goal in plain language, e.g. “a cinematic photo editor that turns night city shots into teal-shadow, warm-highlight cityscapes.”
2. Add the photo you want to grade. Auto loads it as the centerpiece and applies a first-pass look immediately so you can see the direction.
3. Ask for the controls you actually want — preset options to switch between, an intensity slider, and simple brightness/contrast/saturation tweaks.
4. Refine by chatting: “keep the reds true, don’t crush the shadows, add a before/after press-and-hold.” Auto adjusts the Frame live.
5. Export at full resolution when the look is right.

No code, no app store, no settling for a preset that’s almost what you meant.

How someone built theirs

One Auto user built exactly this — a cinematic grader for night photography. They started broad, asking for a Frame that transforms night shots into that teal-and-orange cityscape style, with curated looks like “Midnight Neon” and “Golden Hour Glow,” an intensity slider, and a press-and-hold before/after toggle.

Then they went deep on the actual grade. Instead of one flat filter, they described a proper 3-way color system: lift the blacks slightly so shadows stay teal rather than crushed, push midtones a touch cooler, and split-tone the highlights — warm amber for bulb light, but letting neon and signage stay vivid magenta instead of muddying it toward orange. They even specced HSL per-channel: keep reds true and rich, nudge oranges so skin tones don’t go flat.

Finally, a very human note: give me multiple looks to choose from, and remember color grading should enhance the original photo — no fake shadows, no forced grain. That last correction is the whole point of building your own: you steer it.

The result is the kind of Frame people share as proof this works — like CineGrade.

FAQ

Do I need Lightroom to do this? No. Auto builds a standalone Frame with its own grading controls, so you don’t need Lightroom or any other editor.

Can I make more than one cinematic look? Yes — ask for several presets in one Frame and switch between them with a carousel.

Will it work on my own photos? That’s the idea. You tune the grade to your shots, so it fits your lighting and subjects instead of a stranger’s.