Working With A Place In The Sun By Jill Rubalcaba
I've been using Jill Rubalcaba's presets across dozens of client sessions, and A Place In The Sun is one of the more versatile ones in her library. It's designed as a starting point for warm, golden-hour-style color grading, primarily aimed at portrait and lifestyle photographers. The files themselves are standard XMP sidecars or DNG develop presets depending on what you pick up from her site. The preset applies a lifted black curve, a slight orange shift in the midtones, and a targeted saturation boost around the 55-65nm range in the HSL panel. That's the technical summary. In practice, it turns flat daylight shots into something that looks like it was captured during the last hour before sunset, even if the original was shot at high noon under hard overhead light. Here's how I load and deploy it in my workflow. I shoot in RAW, which is non-negotiable with this preset since it relies on having enough tonal data to work with. I batch import into Lightroom Classic, select the frames from a given session, and apply the preset across all of them at once. That takes maybe ten seconds for a 200-image shoot. Then I go through individually to adjust exposure and white balance, because the preset sometimes pushes shadows too warm on cameras that record cooler natively, like certain Sony bodies.
One thing that trips people up is that the preset assumes a particular white balance baseline. If your shot was taken under mixed lighting, say indoor tungsten next to a window, the preset amplifies the color conflict rather than resolving it. My workaround for that is to set a custom white balance first, usually by using the eyedropper on a neutral area of the frame, and then applying the preset afterward. This alone cuts down post-processing time significantly because I'm not manually correcting color casts that the preset would otherwise exaggerate. Another edge case I ran into recently involved a bride whose skin tones came out slightly greenish after applying the preset. The camera was a Canon R6, and the church lighting was tricky. I ended up pulling the green hue down about twelve points in the HSL panel and nudging the saturation of the orange channel up by four. It fixed the issue without destroying the warm mood the preset was supposed to create. I still file that situation away because it happens more often than I'd like when working with certain skin tone ranges under artificial light. The preset doesn't work well on heavily underexposed images. If your histogram is crushed against the left side, lifting the blacks as the preset does just introduces noise. I learned that the hard way on a outdoor wedding where the bride's dress detail was buried in shadow. What I do now is recover the shadows first, either with a recovery brush or by adjusting the shadow slider before the preset gets applied, and then apply the preset to the corrected base. This sequence matters more than most people realize.
If you're looking to get it, you can find the official files on Jill Rubalcaba's website or through her authorized resellers. The pricing is typically around twenty dollars for individual presets or bundled in her seasonal collections. There are also third-party sites offering repackaged versions, but those often include outdated files that don't match the current Lightroom versions, so I'd stick with the direct source to avoid compatibility issues. The main limitation I'd point out is that this preset is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It's calibrated for a specific look, and if your brand leans toward cooler tones or desaturated editorial styles, you'll spend more time fighting the preset than you'd save. In those cases, something like her Bridesmaid palette or a neutral base preset would be a better starting point. A Place In The Sun is strongest when you're already aiming for that warm, sun-drenched aesthetic and need a fast foundation rather than a fine-tuned final result.
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