Dark editorial look for Lightroom & Sony Alpha
The fashion-magazine grade: crushed shadows, cold highlights, restrained colour and enough contrast to sculpt rather than flatten. Skin is kept slightly cool and matte. Everything serves the shape of the light.
How to shoot and edit it
- Hard, directional light is a prerequisite — the grade sharpens what's there, it can't create shape.
- Keep skin cool but not grey; a touch of orange saturation stops it dying completely.
- Let large parts of the frame go fully black. Half-measures look like underexposure.
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
Bleach bypass comes from skipping the bleach step in film processing, leaving silver in the emulsion: contrast climbs, saturation collapses toward monochrome, and the whole frame takes on a metallic sheen. Harsh, gritty and unmistakably cinematic.
The complementary grade that runs through modern cinema: shadows pushed teal, skin held warm and orange, everything else desaturated so the two poles carry the frame. Overused in bad hands, still extremely effective when the separation is subtle.
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 Dark editorial 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