Jock Sturges Leica

How I Got Here With the Jock Sturges Leica Preset

I picked up the Jock Sturges Leica preset about three years ago after spending too much time manually color-grading soft-light outdoor portraits. The preset is essentially a color transformation profile that pushes midtone warmth, lifts blacks slightly into a warm gray, and rolls highlights toward a muted amber rather than pure white. It was designed to approximate the way Jock Sturges photographs natural light on skin — that particular soft golden quality you see in his work where everything looks slightly sun-bleached but still rich. The file itself is a DNG XMP sidecar combined with a look-up table that you load into Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW. It does not modify your original file. It sits on top as a layer you can toggle on and off. I keep it as a preset called "Sturges LE" so I do not have to hunt for it.

Jock Sturges Leica — What It Actually Does

The preset applies a gentle S-curve to the tone curve with the shadow point lifted to about 5–8 on the slider. This eliminates true black and gives you that vintage paper feel. The color mixer shifts oranges and yellows slightly toward the red channel, which makes skin tones lean warmer without oversaturating. Blues get pushed toward teal in the highlight range, which is why the preset works so well with outdoor natural light but struggles indoors under mixed artificial lighting. There is also a subtle grain overlay baked into the XMP metadata at around 25 percent opacity. Some people find this distracting at first. I stopped noticing it after about twenty images.

Installation and Workflow

Download the file from the creator's page and drop the XMP file into your Lightroom Develop preset folder. On Mac that is typically found at Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Presets. On Windows it lives under Documents\Lightroom\Presets. Restart Lightroom and the preset should appear in your preset panel under Imported. If it does not show up, check that the folder structure contains a preset group folder and that the .xmp extension is not being hidden by your operating system. Apply it to a single image first before dragging it onto a batch. The effect is not uniform across all lighting conditions. In my experience, a properly exposed RAW file shot in open shade responds best. Direct midday sun tends to blow out the highlights because the preset already pushes them warm. I learned this the hard way on a summer shoot in Vermont when I applied the preset to thirty images straight from the camera without checking. Half of them came back with clipped highlights in the sky and I had to recover them individually using the highlight recovery slider, which cost me about forty minutes of editing time that I would have saved by doing a test batch first.

The Practical Problem I Ran Into

Here is a specific edge case that caught me off guard. I was working on a series of indoor portraits lit with a single strobe through a large softbox positioned to the left of the subject. The Jock Sturges Leica preset interprets the warm gel temperature of the studio light and amplifies it, pushing skin tones past yellow into something that looked orange on my calibrated Eizo monitor. The fix was not to reduce the preset intensity. The fix was to go into the white balance section of the Develop module and dial the temperature slider down by about 200–300K before applying the preset, or alternatively to apply the preset and then correct the temperature afterward. Either order works, but doing it after is faster if you are shooting in a controlled environment where the light color is consistent across the entire session. Most people assume the preset is a one-click solution. It is not. It is a starting point that requires at least two adjustments on most files. The first is highlight recovery. The second is a slight contrast bump because the lifted shadows flatten the image enough that it can look muddy on prints. I usually add about 10 to 15 points of contrast after the preset and then reassess. The grain that comes with it also disappears on large prints unless you boost it slightly in the effects panel. At 100 percent zoom it reads fine on screen but gets lost when outputting at 24 by 36 inches. Another thing nobody warns you about: the preset interacts with your camera profile. If you are shooting with a custom camera profile or a third-party LUT loaded as your base profile, the Jock Sturges Leica preset will compound the color shift in unpredictable ways. I recommend resetting your profile to Adobe Standard or the camera's native profile before applying it. It takes about five seconds and saves you from confusion later.

Where It Fails

It does not work well for night photography, high-contrast black and white conversion, or any image where accurate skin tone reproduction is critical for commercial work. I have seen photographers use this for beauty and fashion editorials and end up with inconsistent skin tones because the preset treats every shade of orange differently depending on the original exposure. For that kind of work, a dedicated skin-tone preservation preset or a manual grading pass is more reliable. I use the Sturges preset mainly for landscape and environmental portrait work where the warm, faded look is intentional and skin tone accuracy is less of a concern. If you are looking for the download, it is available through the official Jock Sturges Leica channel or the preset marketplace where it is listed under the landscape and fine art photography categories. The price varies but usually sits around fifteen to twenty dollars depending on whether you are buying it standalone or as part of a bundle. I have not encountered any reliable free alternatives that produce the same result, though some creators offer similar warm-midtone profiles for free that you can modify to get close.