Dirty, fast and raw — mud splatter and high contrast for raw rally race action photography.
- XMP · Lightroom Classic, CC & Camera Raw
- .costyle · Capture One
- .cube · 3D LUT (DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro)
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Rally Mud
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Color rendering varies per monitor and camera model. Your photo is not saved.
Character and mood
Rally Mud puts your photo straight in the dirt. The atmosphere is raw, the energy is high and there is no room for softness. This is not a preset for golden-hour portraits or clean street scenes. This is for the moment when a car tears through a corner, mud flies in every direction and you are standing exactly where you need to be.
The preset works with high contrast and restrained midtones. Highlights are pulled back so details in splatter and dust stay visible. Shadows go dark, but not completely closed off, texture remains in the depth. Colors shift toward earth: browns get warmer, greens pick up a slightly dirty, muted tone and the sky loses any sense of freshness. Whatever shine or smoothness existed in the original image disappears. What remains feels dusty, heavy and real.
Rally Mud works best with rally race photography, but it carries well into other forms of motorsport involving dirt, smoke or wet roads. Think mud classics, off-road events, motocross or tractor pulls. Outside of motorsport it can be equally effective: industrial locations, construction sites, agricultural photography with tractors and open land, or street photography on rainy days in port areas. Anywhere dirt and roughness belong in the atmosphere.
You reach for Rally Mud when you want a photo to feel like you are in the middle of it. Not watching from behind a barrier, but five meters from the car. If you are building a series that needs to feel consistently raw without manually reworking each frame from scratch, this preset gives you a solid starting point. It is deliberately not pushed too far, so you still have room to move it toward your specific image.
One practical tip: adjust exposure before applying the preset, not after. Rally Mud assumes a correctly exposed or slightly underexposed file. If your photo is on the bright side, the contrast can feel too aggressive. Bring exposure down a quarter to half a stop, then apply the preset, and check the shadows from there. That order makes a real difference in how the result holds together.
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.
