Street Noir

Neon reflected in a wet pavement. Someone waiting at a crossing while everyone else hurries past. Street Noir takes its mood from those moments, with ten presets named after feelings. Nine keep the colour; Tension is the only true black and white. For me, ‘Noir’ belongs to the city’s light and shadow, the rain and the evening. A slightly dramatic name, perhaps. There are umbrellas involved.

There’s plenty of colour here. Chaos is the most saturated, made for the visual noise of advertising, neon and clothes competing for attention. Humour brings lively colour to human encounters and those odd little moments when the street becomes theatre. Hope is warm, open and light, suited to small details that make the city feel friendly. You can give the colour room when it’s part of what caught your eye.

The quieter presets take different approaches too. Nostalgia softens contrast and has the most grain, while Solitude keeps things cool and muted for waiting, distance and people looking elsewhere. Calm has a softer touch and very light grain, suited to early, empty streets; Alienation keeps colour muted but makes harsh midday light hard and graphic. Romance adds strong contrast and a vignette to rainy scenes, while Wonder treats reflections and blur more gently. Tension gives silhouettes and strong shadows the highest contrast in the pack, in black and white; every preset has grain and a vignette, in varying amounts.

In practice, install the presets in Lightroom or the styles in Capture One using the included installation PDF. Apply one to a photo, then adjust the exposure and any other settings the photo needs. Give yourself a moment to look before deciding. For a series, choose your starting preset, adjust a representative photo and sync the settings across the others. Check each frame afterwards, especially where the light changes.

The pack works on RAW and JPEG files. You get .xmp files for Lightroom Classic, Lightroom desktop and mobile, plus .costyle files for Capture One. The included .cube 3D LUTs work in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and Photoshop. Subscribers can download Street Noir too.