May

May feels like that afternoon when you notice the light has changed. Not warmer exactly, just fuller. The kind of light that makes an ordinary field look like somewhere you want to stay. This preset tries to hold onto that feeling: warm and bright, but without the blown-out look that strong sun can leave behind. It is not a heavy edit. It is closer to a mood.

Technically, May lifts the warm tones without pushing highlights into overexposure. Shadows stay open rather than going dark. There is a gentle lift in the midtones, which softens the look of skin, grass and petals compared to the raw file. The colour treatment moves yellows and greens toward sunlight, and whites stay white without picking up a blue cast. Contrast is present, but it sits in the texture and structure of a scene rather than in hard jumps between light and shadow.

The preset works well on photos taken in soft or direct daylight. Outdoor portraits in morning or early afternoon light, flower fields, street photos on a sunny day, children playing outside. Images with a lot of white or yellow, blossom, linen clothing, light-coloured buildings, benefit from the way May handles those tones. It can also work well in backlit situations if you exposed carefully when shooting, or added a little positive exposure compensation.

You reach for May when you want a photo that feels like a good day without looking filtered. When you are tired of the cool, blue-leaning tones that many popular presets produce. Or when you are working on a series that needs a warm, consistent thread running through it. It also works as a starting point rather than a final edit: apply it, see what it does, then adjust from there based on your own preference.

A practical tip: sync the preset across a set of photos first, then go through them one by one and adjust only the exposure slider. May is calibrated for an average exposure, but a correction of half a stop to one stop up or down will dial it in for each individual frame. Start with the brightest and darkest images in your set. If the preset holds up on those, it will work across the rest.