So go ahead. Download that cyberpunk manga action pack. Click the play button. Watch your flat lines twist into neon vectors. And when someone asks, “How did you do that?” just smile and say: “A little magic. And a little automation.” Have you ever used a preset pack to save a project? Or do you consider them a creative shortcut too far?

But are preset packs cheating? Or are they the most democratic tool Photoshop has ever seen? To understand the allure, you have to understand the tedium of the alternative. Imagine wanting to create a "double exposure" effect—where a portrait bleeds into a forest scene. Manually, this requires: extracting masks, adjusting levels, brushing opacity, changing blend modes to Screen or Multiply , adding gradient maps, and then fine-tuning curves for contrast. That’s roughly 47 clicks and three minutes of focused work.

What began as a few scattered .ATN (action) files shared on early-2000s forums has ballooned into a multi-million dollar digital economy. Today, a single preset pack can transform a flat smartphone snapshot into a cyberpunk manga panel, turn a gloomy landscape into a golden-hour postcard, or give a digital painting the exact grain of a 1970s pulp novel—all in one click.

But the counter-argument is stronger: Professional artists use preset packs as starting points . They run the action, then delete the layer they don’t like, mask out the effect from the subject’s face, or reduce the opacity to 35%. The pack handles the boring scaffolding—the curves, the levels, the initial color grade—so the artist can focus on the creative decisions that actually matter.

They have a point. Scroll through Instagram’s digital art hashtags, and you’ll see the same teal-and-orange mountains, the same glitched-out anime eyes, the same double-exposure forests. A bad preset pack is a stylistic straightjacket.

The best preset pack won’t make you a great artist. But it might just free up enough of your life to let you become one.

It starts with a blank canvas and a cursor blinking like a judgmental metronome.

For the uninitiated, Adobe Photoshop is a bottomless ocean of menus, sliders, blend modes, and adjustment layers. Mastering it feels like learning a dead language while juggling. But for a growing army of digital artists, photographers, and designers, there’s a secret weapon that bypasses the learning curve entirely: the humble, explosive preset pack .