October

October is not autumn at its prettiest. That is September, with its soft light and warm colours. October is wetter, greyer, more honest. This preset reflects that. No golden glow over a leafy path, but the weight of a wet morning. Brown leaves stuck to the pavement. A sky that starts and ends nowhere. That feeling is built into this preset.

Technically, the preset pulls the exposure back slightly and pushes the shadows toward a cool blue-grey. Highlights are not lifted, quite the opposite: they are muted, so the contrast does not punch but creeps in. Colours shift toward earth tones, green becomes olive, orange becomes brown, blue nearly disappears. The result is a palette that sits close to black and white, but not quite. That remaining colour is just enough to ground the scene.

October works best on photos where the weather is visible. Wet streets, bare trees, people in coats and hoods. Street photography in the city centre, an empty market square, a cyclist in the rain. Outdoor portraits can work well too, especially when the background is open and overcast. Scenes with a lot of texture, cobblestones, bark, old facades, come through stronger because the preset keeps contrast in the midtones.

You reach for this preset when a photo already carries the mood of late autumn but looks too colourful or too flat in its current state. It strips out what is excessive without flattening the image. It also works well as part of a series: if you want several autumn photos to feel like they belong together, this preset holds them in the same light.

One practical tip: start with exposure. If your photo looks slightly too dark after applying the preset, raise exposure by half a stop before touching anything else. The colour balance will almost always still hold after that. Be careful with the white balance slider. It sits deliberately on the cool side, and that is where most of the character comes from.