Powerful wave release — desaturated blues and white splatter for epic surf photography.
- XMP · Lightroom Classic, CC & Camera Raw
- .costyle · Capture One
- .cube · 3D LUT (DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro)
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Wave Breaker
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Character and mood
Wave Breaker was built around a single moment: the second a wave gives way and everything turns to white noise. It is not a preset for calm water or golden-hour reflections. It is for the chaos just before and just after impact, when the ocean reminds you it does not care about your camera. The look is cool, controlled, and heavy with tension.
The preset pulls saturation out of the blues and shifts them toward a colder, steelier tone. Water stops looking tropical and starts looking serious. Highlights in foam and spray are deliberately reined in, keeping texture visible instead of blowing out to flat white. Shadows get a slight lift, which creates a matte quality in the darkest areas of the frame. Contrast is concentrated in the midtones, where wave structure lives, rather than pushed to dramatic extremes at either end of the histogram.
Wave Breaker works best on surf photography, but the preset is equally at home on rocky coastlines, storm sequences, and any scene where water is moving fast and breaking hard. A surfer threading a barrel, a swell folding over a reef, spray kicked up by wind against a pier, all of these sit naturally inside the look this preset creates. Overcast and flat light tends to work better than sharp blue-sky sun, because the preset is designed to contain color rather than amplify it.
You reach for Wave Breaker when you want the viewer to feel the weight of water, not admire its color. The processing steps back so that motion and texture carry the image. It is a deliberate choice, not a dramatic one. If your file has solid shadow detail and highlights that are not already blown, the preset gives you a clean result without further adjustment.
One practical note before you apply it: if you shot in bright midday light, drop your exposure by 0.3 to 0.5 stops first. Foam overexposes quickly, and Wave Breaker assumes your highlights are already under control. That small adjustment is the difference between washed-out white and foam you can actually see, drop by drop, across the whole frame.
Installation
Lightroom Classic & CC (desktop)
Unzip the downloaded file on your computer. Open Lightroom Classic and go to the Develop module. Right-click the Presets panel, choose 'Import Presets', and select the .xmp file. The preset appears in your list immediately and can be applied to any photo straight away.
Lightroom Mobile
Lightroom Mobile syncs presets via the cloud. Import the .xmp file into Lightroom CC on your desktop first. Once cloud sync completes, the preset is automatically available on your phone or tablet. An Adobe CC subscription is required for this sync feature.
Capture One
Unzip the file. Open Capture One and navigate to the Styles panel. Click the arrow next to 'Styles' and choose 'Import Style'. Select the .costyle file. The style is available in your library immediately. Works with Capture One version 21 and later.
DaVinci Resolve / Premiere Pro (3D LUT)
Copy the .cube file to your application's LUT folder. In DaVinci Resolve via Project Settings → Color Management → LUT folders. In Premiere Pro via the Lumetri Color panel → Creative tab → Look → Browse. The LUT works on both LOG and standard exposed video footage.
