Have you ever been in front of your computer, waiting for Lightroom to fire up? Normally, this process takes a few seconds at worst, taking you to the familiar interface. Still, sometimes, you’ll be greeted with an error message saying that your catalog has been corrupted. What do you do after multiple attempts to fix or recreate your catalog? If your answer has been panic, throw your laptop against the wall, or cry, then Colorsuite is a browser-based app that you need to familiarize yourself with now.
The Big Picture: Colorsuite App Preset Recovery Tool
If you’re a photographer or an editor who has built up their catalog by creating multiple presets, and your signature style is built around them, you’ll appreciate what the Colorsuite web app can do. It’s super simple to use and does exactly what it claims to do – extract the XML data from your exported JPEGs to recreate the preset. Be warned: if you export your final images and remove the associated metadata, this won’t work.
If you want to try it out for yourself, you can use the tool for free here; just be sure to drop some change in the Kofi account if you find it helpful.
Pros
- Free to use
- Simple drag-and-drop interface
- No server-side processing; your images remain yours
- Option to download the result as LUT or XMP file
Cons
- No fine-tuning available
- Results don’t seem to carry over to black and white images.
- Only works if you remembered to export your work with the “All Metadata” option selected in Lightroom.
Colorsuite is by far the easiest solution for recovering your lost presets or, at the very least, reducing the time needed to recreate them.
Colorsuite.App Gear Used for Testing
I used my 2024 MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip, 18GB of memory, and Mac OS 15.4.1 Sequoia for this review. Additionally, I used Lightroom Classic version 14.3 for this test. All were purchased independently.
Ease of Use
The beauty of the color suite applet is that it is a drag-and-drop process. There aren’t any downloads or paywalls, drop in a JPEG file that was edited using your missing preset, and let the applet do its thing. It doesn’t take long to crunch through the metadata in your image file and deliver an XMP or LUT file ready to import into your Lightroom presets. This makes getting back a specific look easier, whether you’re only working with stills in Lightroom or exporting a custom profile to a camera via LUTs (ala the LUMIX S9 or Nikon Zf).
While using the app is super simple, it’s not perfect. One of the biggest issues I’ve encountered working with the app is that it will not work with black-and-white presets. While the Colorsuite app easily pulls information like saturation, luminosity, and individual color data, it cannot distinguish if an image was edited to be monochrome or color. If you’ve spent years developing black-and-white profiles and somehow lost them over time, unfortunately, Colorsuite.app will not be able to restore those profiles (but at the very least it will give you a good place to start).
One last and important caveat to working with Colorsuite—I hope you remembered to export those JPEG files with the “All Metadata” option selected in the Export dialog in Lightroom. That’s right, this will only work if there’s metadata to pull. It seems self-explanatory, but I’m adding this section if you try it out with a series of photos and get an error message saying there isn’t any Lightroom data in your image file.
Innovation
Are there other ways of restoring your Lightroom presets? Yes, unless you’re already a confident coder, you can pull the metadata via command-line or Terminal and then save it as an XMP file, or you can pay for a tool that is hit or miss. Colorsuite’s most innovative feature is that all processing is handled in the browser and not on a server. This ensures privacy, but most importantly, that your work will remain yours, without having to upload your photos to a random server where you will lose control and potentially own your work. This is especially critical if you’re parsing through client work where you’ve had to either execute contracts or sign modeling agreements – the last thing you need is getting sued because you allowed NDA work to end up in someone’s LLM.
Mitigation vs. Elimination and Where Colorsuite Falls
When I think about my workflow, I often think about eliminating vs. mitigating a potential issue. Eliminating potential problems means investing in backup solutions, as with Lightroom (I’m a 10-year vet with this software – I know it will eventually fail). Whether it’s saving color profiles/presets, RAW files, or catalogs, I do my best to do it often. That being said, I’ve neglected to remain diligent in this practice, and sometimes you need a tool to mitigate these problems. Colorsuite is by far the easiest solution for recovering your lost presets, or at the very least, reducing the time needed to recreate them.
