Comparing Our True to Color Presets
Every photo editing style has its “trending” period, and right now, we’ve noticed a lot of color accurate and true to color editing is trending out there! Let’s take a deep dive into our true to color Quest Presets, and a look at the color accurate offerings in the Archipelago Presets shop as well!
What is “true to color” or “color accurate” editing, anyway?
True-to-color or color-accurate editing in photography refers to the process of maintaining colors in your images that closely match how they appeared in real life—or how the human eye perceived them at the time of shooting. This approach emphasizes natural, realistic, and balanced color tones rather than stylized or heavily altered hues.
Key Characteristics:
🎨 Accurate Skin Tones: Especially important for portraits—skin should look natural, not overly orange, red, or pale.
🌿 Realistic Colors in Nature: Greens look like greens, not neon or overly desaturated.
☀️ White Balance is Neutral: Whites appear white, without strong color casts.
🔧 Subtle Use of HSL & Color Grading: Adjustments enhance the image but don’t distort the original colors.
💻 Calibrated Monitor & Color Profiles: Ensures you're seeing and editing true color on screen.
Image by David Griso
Edited with Quest 13 Intrepid
Why Edit True to Color?
Great for brand photography, weddings, editorial, and documentary work where authenticity is key.
Makes your work versatile and timeless.
Ensures consistency across platforms, devices, and print.
Image by Fabrizio Simoneen
Edited with Quest 21 Wayfarer SE
The Truest of the True Color
The following presets we offer are the TRUEST true color or color accurate presets in our shops!
Image by Flora Gibson
Light & Truth is the culmination of years of development and refinement, resulting in a preset collection that effortlessly elevates your images to their full potential. These presets have been meticulously crafted to enhance your photos with true-to-life colors, crisp, bright whites, and natural skin tones, all while preserving the authenticity of the captured scene. Whether you’re shooting weddings, portraits, or product images, these presets provide the perfect balance of subtlety and style, allowing you to achieve a polished look with just a few clicks.
This set features five color presets, each offering a distinct dynamic while maintaining the natural hues of your photos. You can choose between balanced, contrasty, bright, filmic, or muted tones. Also included is a clean and natural black-and-white preset with a versatile, timeless look. With the Light & Truth creative profiles you can dial your edit further by adjusting the midtones and bringing in a soft glow, with one simple slider.
The included Light & Truth Toolset offers a range of tools to help fine-tune your edits, including the Picture Perfect tool, which enhances multiple elements within your image with a single click.
Available in the Quest Archive and Quest Public Shop
Serenus is designed to give your images a refined and polished look while maintaining absolute color accuracy across all hues. Each preset gently lifts the shadows and adds a soft contrast, bringing a flattering dynamic to your subject without straying from the essence of what you captured.
The Serenus Creative Profile brings a subtle filmic edge by adding a soft peachy overtone and (for the first time in a creative profile) adding a subtle grain texture.
Perfect for wedding photography, product imagery, lifestyle, journalistic work, and any instances where color accuracy is a top priority.
Image by Ernesto Villalba
Color Accurate Portraits
Presets designed for editing true to color portraits with an emphasis on accurate skin tones, but versatile enough for any genre!
Atelier is a refined Lightroom preset collection designed for photographers who blend the worlds of studio portraiture and editorial storytelling. Crafted with accuracy in mind, these presets enhance skin tones while maintaining a bold yet natural look, ensuring your work stands out with a polished yet effortless finish. Beyond color refinement, Atelier includes specialized lighting tools that shape and sculpt light, emulating the nuanced effects of professional modifiers. Whether you’re working with soft, diffused tones or crisp, directional highlights, this set provides the control needed to craft dynamic, high-impact imagery straight from your edits.
Perfect for photographers who demand precision and artistry in their studio work, Atelier delivers the finishing touch that transforms portraits into timeless editorial pieces.
Soraya delivers a luminous set of presets aimed at delivering stunning brightness and pastelic color to your fashion & editorial workflow. Included in the set is 1 base color grading preset along with 2 variations and 3 tools giving you a wide range of flexibility both practically and artistically.
Color Accurate Variations
These presets offer true hues with more stylistic options, like editorial, colorful, modern, and more.
Limited Release Chroma Presets
Available in the Archipelago Presets Shop
Image by Foggy Stories
Chroma is a color accurate preset collection with an extra pop of bold color. This limited release Archipelago set celebrates color in its purest form, infusing your images with brilliance and vivid tones. Each of the 6 presets subtly adjusts the hues of your image, striking a perfect balance between natural and evocative while adding a luminous glow to the scene. Transform your photos into bold yet harmonious works of art filled with emotion and rich color. Chroma masterfully combines precision and creativity, making it ideal for crafting striking narratives, whether in glossy magazines or digital campaigns. This set allows you to create imagery that is both authentic and impactful.
The dedicated Chroma Toolset includes AI-powered hue shift presets that allow for independent color groups to be toned to your liking without affecting your subject's skin tone or hair color.
Limited Release Veritas Presets
Available in the Archipelago Presets Shop
Image by Jordan Jankun Photography
Veritas is a color accurate preset with more muted, cinematic, editorial hues. This Limited Release Lightroom preset collection honors the art of truth in its purest form. Designed for the discerning creative, this pack bridges the gap between cinematic grandeur and minimalist precision. At the heart of Veritas lies a dedication to authenticity. Each of the 5 color presets is carefully crafted to deliver true-to-tone palettes, evoking the subtle richness of filmic color grades while maintaining the integrity of your original shot. The black-and-white preset, stark yet soulful, transforms light and shadow into pure emotion, revealing the depth within simplicity.
Veritas includes a dedicated Cine Toolset, offering finely tuned emulations of essential cinematic techniques. Experiment with:
Lens Emulations: Channel the character of anamorphic lenses, with their signature bokeh and subtle distortions.
Filters: Recreate the tactile effects of ND filters, diffusion filters, and much more for an elevated look.
Cinemagic: Included in Veritas is the innovative Cinemagic Tool, this applies a curated suite of effects simultaneously to achieve a transformative result. From emulating the softness of diffusion filters to capturing the drama of cinematic contrast and tone, Cinemagic is your shortcut to a polished, professional-grade aesthetic.
Available in the Quest Archive and Quest Public Shop
Set out on a new adventure with this special edition Wayfarer extension set offering 3 color presets, each exploring a bold new aesthetic while remaining true to the original set. Using Lightroom’s AI technology, each preset applies a subject and background mask, which can be controlled independently using the preset amount slider for endless customization. Also included is the New Horizon creative profile, which mutes the highlights and adds a pale yellow overtone. Plus, 2 simple white borders which provide the perfect finishing touch to your photo.
Image by Heather K Purdy
Available in the Archipelago Archive Shop
Image by Sherri Poirier
FOURXFIVE is a filmic preset that offers more color-accurate and vibrant hues, designed to emulate the unmistakable richness and depth found in large format film images.
Slow down, connect with your camera and your subject, and be present and mindful. Our FOURXFIVE preset collection aims to bring this feeling, this magic, to your work.
Inspired by 4x5 film, the FOURXFIVE collection features five color and one B&W preset. Also included are three unique film borders, easily applied with one-click, adding a unique film vibe to your images.
Customize your edit further to achieve that large-format film look with the included Blur, Contrast, and Dark tools. The included Color and BW Density profiles add or decrease overall image density and contrast.
Quest True to Color Bundle
The True to Color Bundle of Quest Presets is available in the Quest Archive and Quest Public Shop
If you’re looking for the best combination of our true to color Quest sets to try, shop the true to color bundle and get Quest 01 Diffusion, Quest 13 Intrepid, Quest 27 Serenus, and Quest 37 Soraya!
Each of the above mentioned presets applied to one photo:
Image by Kerlyn van Gelder
Edits in order: SOOC, Light & Truth, Chroma, Veritas, FOURXFIVE, Quest 01 Diffusion, Quest 13 Intrepid, Quest 21 Wayfarer SE, Quest 27 Serenus, Quest 37 Soraya, and Quest 45 Atelier
What is your favorite true to color preset? Tell us in the comments!