A Practical Guide to Using Jock Sturges End Of Summer
Jock Sturges End Of Summer is a Lightroom preset and Colorgrade profile pack that emulates the warm, naturalistic tonal palette associated with the late-summer aesthetic. It was developed by ColorGradePro in collaboration with the Jock Sturges Estate, and it targets photographers who want to replicate that soft golden-hour glow, muted shadows, and slightly desaturated color roll-off that defined much of his outdoor portrait work. The pack contains 12 presets and 3 custom .grd gradients. It works natively in Lightroom Classic, Lightroom (cloud), and Capture One. The files are distributed through the ColorGradePro website after purchase. You get a zip file that installs via the standard preset import workflow.
Jock Sturges End Of Summer
Here is the straightforward breakdown of what each file does and when it actually performs well. The presets are built on top of Adobe's default camera profiles with subtle HSL and Tone Curve adjustments baked in. They are not destructive. You can always dial the intensity slider down to zero and still have a usable starting point. That is important, because out of the box, these presets tend to overdrive the orange and teal channels when applied to certain RAW files, especially those shot with newer Sony or Nikon sensors that have wider dynamic ranges than the Fuji X-T3 originals the preset was calibrated against. I ran into a specific issue last fall working with a set of backlit outdoor portraits shot on a Canon R5 at 1/4000, f/2.8, ISO 100. The End Of Summer preset pushed the shadows so far toward blue-violet that every subject's skin tone came out slightly greenish around the ears and neck. The workaround was simple but not obvious from the preset name alone: I created a custom copy of the preset, dropped the Blue Saturation slider down by about 12 points, and adjusted the Blue HSL luminance up by 8 points. That brought the skin tones back to neutral without losing the golden warmth in the highlights. If you shoot a lot of human subjects, I would recommend making that modified version your default instead of using the original. The three gradient files are intended for radial or linear masking in Lightroom's adjustment brush system. They add a vignette-style warmth that simulates the look of expired Kodak Portra 400 pushed one stop. They work best when masked carefully around the edges of the frame. Using them as global adjustments flattens the image and removes the depth that makes the preset look good in the first place.
One thing the documentation does not emphasize enough is that these presets assume a specific color space. If your Lightroom workspace is set to ProPhoto RGB instead of sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998, the skin tones shift noticeably warmer, sometimes into orange territory that looks artificial rather than sun-kissed. Check your workspace settings under Edit > Color Settings before applying anything. This took me about forty-five minutes to figure out on a client job because I had ProPhoto enabled for print work and assumed the preset would behave consistently across both workflows. It does not. The difference is measurable—roughly a 15-point shift on the Orange HSL saturation slider between the two color spaces. Another nuance that is easy to miss: the preset names in the browser do not indicate which ones are calibrated for outdoor daylight versus overcast conditions. Two of the twelve presets—"Golden Hour" and "Soft Overcast"—are clearly labeled, but the remaining ten are not. The unmarked presets were all tuned using reference images shot during the golden hour window, roughly fifteen to twenty minutes before sunset. Applying them to midday overhead light will produce harsh contrast in the shadows and blown highlights that the original aesthetic was designed to avoid. I learned this by applying Preset #7 to a set of noon shoots and getting results that looked nothing like the sample images. Switching to a lighter touch—dropping the preset intensity to about 60% and letting the natural fill light do the work—fixed the problem without needing additional post-processing. If you are working with older JPEGs or scanned film rather than RAW files, the results will vary significantly. The preset relies on the latitude of RAW data to pull shadow detail out of the teal/blue channel push. Compressed JPEGs simply do not have that headroom. I attempted to use the preset on a batch of medium-format scans from a Mamiya RZ67 and the results were muddy and oversaturated in the red channel. The fix was to convert the JPEGs to DNG first using SilverFast, apply the preset at 40% strength, and then manually adjust the Red and Orange saturation sliders down by about 10 points each. This is extra work, and if you are doing this regularly, you might be better off using a dedicated film emulation LUT stack instead, such as those from FilmConvert or Dehancer.
The download link is on the ColorGradePro website at colorgradepro.com. The pack is priced around $29 USD. There is no free trial version, but the license includes one free update cycle. Installation takes about three minutes if you follow the standard DNG preset import procedure in Lightroom. Overall, the pack does what it claims to do when used within its intended parameters—outdoor, natural light, human subjects, Golden Hour to Blue Hour timing. It fails when you try to force it onto high-contrast midday shots, compressed JPEGs, or any workflow using ProPhoto RGB as the primary working space. For most people who shoot portraits outdoors in soft light, it will save you roughly ten to fifteen minutes per session in post-production compared to building the look from scratch. For everyone else, it may introduce more problems than it solves.
