Can a Lightroom preset copy another photo's look?

Short answer: partially — and it's worth understanding which part, because the gap between "close match" and "approximation" is where most preset disappointment comes from.

What a develop preset can express

A Lightroom preset is a bundle of slider values: white balance, per-channel tone curves, and the HSL panel's eight hue bands, among others. Together these can reproduce a surprising amount of a look:

• Global warmth or coolness — white balance handles this almost exactly.
• Contrast and tonal character — lifted blacks, rolled highlights, faded film curves: per-channel tone curves are genuinely expressive here.
• Broad hue moves — "greens toward yellow", "skin less magenta": the HSL bands cover these when the shift applies to a whole hue family.

What it structurally cannot express

A preset applies the same adjustment to a colour wherever it appears. Some looks violate that assumption:

• Split-toning by luminance: teal shadows with golden highlights on the same hue — a preset's HSL band can push that hue one way, not both ways at once. (Lightroom's colour-grading wheels recover some of this, with limits.)
• Crossed or interacting channels: looks where the red response depends on how much blue is present. This is inherently three-dimensional; sliders are one-dimensional.
• Local adjustments baked into the reference — a vignette or a masked sky grade isn't a global colour property at all.

The honest workflow

Fit the full three-dimensional transform first, then derive both outputs from it: a .cube LUT that reproduces the transform exactly (for video editors), and a preset that gets as close as sliders allow — with the residual error measured and disclosed, so you know before downloading whether your look is "close match" territory or genuinely 3D. That measurement is the difference between an honest tool and a hopeful one.

Related guides

• How to create a LUT from a reference image
• How 3D LUTs actually work