Mercedes silver across three light conditions
The brand colour is the same on a phone in São Paulo and a press kit in Stuttgart only if you build a colour pipeline that survives Algarve sunset, Lisbon overcast and studio strobes. Here's the one we use.
The brief from Mercedes-Benz wasn't "colour-correct the brand silver". It was: make sure the silver reads the same on every channel, every device, every print, for a year.
That second part is the engineering problem. The first part is a Lightroom slider.
Three light kingdoms
Most product photography lives in one of three lighting universes: studio (controlled, repeatable, dull), overcast natural (diffuse, low-contrast, kind to chrome), and direct sun (high-contrast, specular, ruthless on brand reds).
Mercedes silver — the real Estugarda spec — has a specific chroma + lightness range that breaks in different ways in each kingdom. Studio strobes flatten it. Lisbon clouds blue-shift it. Algarve hours past noon push it warm into pewter.
The preset stack
We built three Lightroom preset variants — one per kingdom — that all converge on the same RGB target for the bodywork. Same source RAW. Three different paths. Same output.
- Studio: recover highlights, lift mid-tones, neutralise the +3 magenta that comes from our strobes' colour temperature
- Overcast: warm by 250K, recover blue-shift in shadows, hold AMG signal red at 95% saturation
- Direct sun: roll off specular, recover the warm push, pull tint toward green at 200K to neutralise the gold cast
None of these are extreme adjustments. They're tuned within the brand-approved colour window. The point isn't to look the same — it's to read the same on a phone in São Paulo and a press release in Stuttgart.
Why presets, not LUTs
LUTs lock you in. Once a frame is baked through a LUT, the colour decision is final. A Lightroom preset is a starting point — the colour scientist can ride the curves on the frame that wants different treatment.
For ad creative this is overkill. For a brand that ships across markets it's the only way the work survives a 12-month asset window.
The honest part
The presets aren't the work. The work is the eye that decides when a preset is wrong and the frame needs a different treatment. The presets just remove the work of getting to the same starting line every time.