At the Desk

At the Desk is a preset built for one specific situation: photographing someone in the light of a monitor. That light is cold, flat and blue. Without correction, your subject looks pale, almost drained. This preset removes that blue cast and brings skin tones back to something that looks right.

Technically, the preset shifts the white balance toward warmth and adjusts the tone curve to break up the cold midtones. The blue channel is pulled back, while the red and orange channels are given a little more weight. It sounds like a heavy correction, but the result is restrained. No fake sunset glow, no over-warm skin. Just a face that looks like a face under artificial light.

The preset works best when a screen is the primary light source. Think of someone working at a laptop, a designer in front of a large monitor, or a gamer sitting in a dark room. It also holds up well in mixed light situations, where screen glow combines with a desk lamp or a little daylight coming in from the side. Portrait photography in office environments is another natural fit.

You reach for At the Desk when the screen is doing most of the lighting work, not as fill light, but as the main source. In those situations, auto white balance often struggles. The camera tries to compensate and overshoots, or gives up and leaves everything blue. This preset gives you a reliable starting point, so you are not manually correcting every single frame from scratch.

A practical note: start with the preset at 100% and check the skin tone first. If the correction feels too strong, bring the intensity down to 70 or 80 percent in Lightroom's Develop module. In frames with a lot of white in the scene, like a bright desk surface or a white wall, the warmth can occasionally push toward yellow. A small nudge on the Temp slider is usually enough to bring it back into balance.