I didn't take a single photograph this week. The Bonnie View take was still sitting in the catalog — 569 files, most of them the same church from slightly different distances, shot across three climbs up one hill. I'd been avoiding it. There is a particular dread in opening a folder you already know is two-thirds throwaway. So I spent the week at the desk instead of on a hill. Culled to about forty.And somewhere around frame 140 I caught myself doing the same handful of things to every single file — same sliders, same order, before I'd made one creative decision about any of them. That's this issue. And at the end of it I'm giving the whole thing away.

Anyone watching over my shoulder in the first ninety seconds of an edit would think I was absolutely wrecking the photograph. They would be right. I am, on purpose.

The trap of a good-looking raw.

When you open a raw file, Lightroom doesn't show you the raw file. It shows you an interpretation — a default profile with contrast and saturation already baked in, picked to make the thumbnail look decent in a grid.The problem isn't that it looks bad. The problem is that it looks fine. A file that already looks fine turns you into a mechanic instead of an editor. You start nudging, you fix whatever bothers you, and an hour later you've got a pile of small corrections to somebody else's default rather than a thing you decided.

So before I make a single creative choice, I take the file apart.

1: kill the profileProfile → Camera Neutral.

Not Adobe Color, not Camera Standard. Neutral is the flattest of the camera-matched profiles — less contrast, less saturation, more neutral.

The profile sits underneath everything; every slider you touch afterwards works on top of that curve. Swap it at the end of an edit and you'll watch your careful work slide sideways. Swap it first and that never happens.

2: blacks to +100All the way. This is not a suggestion, blacks lifts the darkest tones in the file.

At +100 the image loses its floor — shadows open up, the picture goes soft and hazy and noticeably less impressive. That is the point. Nothing is being crushed and hidden anymore, so every scrap of shadow information the sensor actually recorded is sitting in plain view where I can see it and decide about it.

I want to choose where black falls. I can't choose it if it's already there.

3: Whites down until the brightest areas of the image are a pale glow. Whites negative pulls the highlight point down, and I keep pulling until the brightest areas stop being undifferentiated white and start showing texture again.The number moves with the file. On these two frames it's −55 and −80 — same evening, same hill, minutes apart. Anyone who tells you their number is the number is describing their camera and their light, not yours. Hold Alt while you drag; Lightroom will show you exactly what's clipping. Pull until nothing is.

What it should look like now

Soft. Hazy. extremely boring and flatter than you would like. About thirty percent less interesting than when you opened it.

Look at the panel: exposure 0, contrast 0, highlights 0, shadows 0.

Only two sliders moved. Everything that actually shapes a picture is still untouched.

That isn't an edit. It's a blank canvas — the full range spread out flat, nothing hidden at either end, ready for one deliberate decision instead of six reactive ones.

The colour half of the same idea.

There's a second layer, and it happens in Calibration, not HSL.

My HSL panel on these files is entirely at zero.HSL is a scalpel — it isolates one band of colour and moves it independently of the rest. Calibration works on the primaries the whole image is built from, so a change there travels through every colour at once, in relationship.

It's the difference between repainting one wall and changing the light in the room.

These are my numbers exactly, i use this on every file no changes.

The green primary is doing most of the work here. Jamaica's lush tropical foliage is overwhelmingly green, and Lightroom's default skews it yellow and slightly plastic on my files; pushing the hue lands the foliage closer to what I see standing in it.

Blue hue down and saturation up is what keeps parts of the frame like the harbour and the sky separate instead of collapsing into one indistinguishable wash of cyan.

Copy them, then change them — these are tuned to my sensor and my island. Drag the green primary hue on one of your own files and watch the whole frame move at once.

That's the lesson, not my numbers. I've packaged the lot: profile, blacks, whites, calibration, the small negative texture and clarity, the tint. It's called Photon v1, and I am giving it away free. Link at the bottom.

One honest note: it ships with Whites at −64, which is a starting point and nothing more. That's the one value you should expect to change on every file. Then the curve.

Everything above is preparation. The actual photograph — the contrast, the mood, where the shadows finally land — gets built in the tone curve, on top of this flat base, in one place instead of six. That's in a future issue. That's the fun one.

One Frame

Christ Church, Port Antonio, from the hill. 178mm, f/9, 1/200, ISO 400. Where it landed — highlights +42, shadows +22, saturation +24, and contrast pulled down eight. There's also a whisper of global grading in there — hue 211 at a saturation of 3; just a tups.
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A Location Note

Portland is most often under cloud. Everybody complains about the overcast here, and I've done my share, but flat light is generous with data. Nothing clips, the histogram sits fat in the middle, and files shot under it take this kind of preparation beautifully — there's real information at both ends to pull back out. Harsh directional light gives you a dramatic raw and a difficult edit (ironic that I love strong directional Light). Cloud gives you a dull raw and an easy one. Shoot the cloud. Build the drama at the desk.
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​Photon — my base-prep preset, free​