Blue hour look for Lightroom & Sony Alpha
The twenty minutes after sunset when the sky still holds light but every surface has gone cool and blue. Low contrast, open shadows, desaturated except for the blues, and an atmospheric haze that flattens distance.
How to shoot and edit it
- Keep shadows open. Crushing them destroys the atmospheric depth that defines blue hour.
- Artificial lights coming on give you warm accents to play against the blue — wait for them.
- Underexpose slightly in camera; blue hour metering tends to overbrighten and kill the mood.
What you'll get
A Lightroom Classic preset you can import as a .xmp, a Sony Alpha Creative Look recipe for new-menu bodies, and a Picture Profile recipe that works on every Alpha back to the A7 III — all tuned to this look, in one generation.
Generate it nowRelated looks
800T is cinema film respooled for stills, balanced for tungsten light: shot at night the shadows go deep blue while sodium and neon sources bloom warm orange, with the characteristic red halation glowing around every bright point. The definitive night-city film.
Eterna is Fujifilm's motion-picture profile: very flat, desaturated, with markedly lifted blacks and a slight cool bias. It is not a finished look — it is a base built to survive a grade, which makes it the natural pick when stills and video have to match.
Dark, desaturated and contrasty: the look that dominates urban photography feeds. Shadows go deep and cool, colour is pulled back to near-neutral, and grain keeps it from feeling digitally clean. Light separation matters more than colour.
Make your own version of Blue hour look
Adjust the description, add a reference photo, or import a preset you already own — Preset Lab returns the Lightroom values and the in-camera settings together.
Open the generator