If you remember to save your preset before hitting Apply, then all the pending changes will be saved. Where users make a mistake is not saving their presets often, or forgetting which one has the last set of changes. NTLite will create an Auto-saved copy, during processing, unless you have disabled that from Settings.
A common error is not saving your work-in-progress edits. I have seen countless posts where a shared preset is "empty" meaning someone applied changes, and started a new session after they reloaded the edited image. The preset only records what you intend to do right now, and is NOT a running history of all previous changes applied to the image.
