Her preset packages go for between $25 and $200, and once a preset is created and uploaded to a marketplace such as FilterGrade, it can generate ongoing income with little to no additional work. Now Corbin isn’t just selling sonic facial brushes and cold-pressed body wash on Instagram-she’s selling the aesthetic that makes selling all that other stuff easy. The tagged photos all look like an extension of Corbin’s feed.

Now her followers share their own photos, washed in Corbin’s exact shade of pink, using Corbin’s preset under #MADDYCORBINPRESETS. She eventually landed on a pastel-pink look that her peers were happy to pay for. Maddy Corbin, who lives in Indianapolis and has nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram, spent months in Lightroom “playing around, figuring out what kind of aesthetic I had and what colors best represented my brand,” she said. Influencers have relied on Lightroom for years, but it wasn’t until June of this year that Adobe finally introduced the ability to create and share presets entirely on mobile, and a preset boom was born. Influencers run all their photos through a specific preset in order to cultivate an aesthetic and make their feed look cohesive. Presets are custom filters applied using Adobe Lightroom, a photo-editing tool. That’s not an accident, or an example of photographic mastery it’s a preset. Maybe every image seems washed in pink, or the blues are all the same, or every image is just the right amount of faded.

Scroll through many of their Instagram feeds, and you’ll begin to notice something: The photos all look vaguely the same. “Influencers” are people who have established credibility in a specific realm or industry, and who leverage a social-media following to exert influence and, usually, make money.

Instagram presets