After editing over 10,000 photos professionally, I keep seeing the same mistakes from content creators trying to build a consistent feed.

1. Crushing the blacks too hard

Everyone wants that moody look, but when you slam the blacks to zero you lose all the detail in shadows. Pull them back up slightly. Your photos will still look cinematic but you'll keep the texture that makes an image feel real.

2. Over-saturating skin tones

Orange skin is not a vibe. When you boost saturation globally, skin tones suffer first. Use the HSL panel in Lightroom to pull back orange and red saturation by 10-15 while keeping everything else punchy.

3. Ignoring white balance before applying presets

This is the big one. Presets are built assuming neutral white balance. If your shot is 3000K warm and you slap a warm preset on it, everything goes orange. Fix white balance first, then apply.

These three fixes alone will put your edits ahead of 90% of creators. I built my entire preset pack around solving these problems — every preset handles skin tones, shadow detail, and colour balance properly out of the box.