Reversal

It was made to be projected. And a dark room needs more contrast to look normal than a lit one does — that's a real, measured thing about how eyes work, not a figure of speech.

You're looking at a screen, with the lights on.

So the punchy, saturated thing everyone loves about scanned slides is partly a mismatch — you're seeing a rendering built for a blacked-out room, in a room that isn't one. Which is why the curve comes in two versions instead of one.

Set your white balance and exposure first, then pick a film and stop. Same number means same job — pick one. Different numbers stack.

My own work, straight out of this pack.

Every other pack here deliberately stops short of pure white, so you keep somewhere to go with the Whites slider. This one doesn't.

A slide is a positive — you're looking at the actual film. Its white is clear film, and past that there's nothing. You get about a stop of gentle compression and then it stops dead. Overexposed slide punches holes in the picture, which is precisely what it looks like.

So 01a hard-clips the whites on purpose. If that bothers you, that's what 01b is for — once you've accepted you're not in a dark room, there's no reason to keep throwing away the top stop.

The shadows fail more gently. There's real detail down there on the film; most scanners just can't reach it. A lot of what people call slide film's blocked shadows is the scanner giving up, not the film.

Both of these were on this site until I actually checked.

"Slide film has no orange mask, so its layers line up and there's almost no colour crossover." Backwards. Slide film can't have a mask, because a mask is an overall colour cast — on a negative you print through it, but a slide is the finished thing, so a mask would just make it orange. Which means the colour errors a mask would have fixed are never fixed at all. And the crossover is real, and it lives in the shadows: Kodak's own processing tolerances let the three layers drift about 60% further apart down there than up in the highlights.

"Slide is three times as contrasty as negative, so build it that way." A trap. A negative gets printed onto paper that adds its own contrast, so the finished print lands in much the same place. The difference between slide and negative isn't the final contrast — it's the latitude, and the shape of the two ends. That's what this pack actually encodes.

Reversal and Emulsion are two answers to the same question, so they mostly replace each other rather than stacking — both write the curve, the colour and the grain. Pick a pack, not a mixture.

Nightfall's illuminant presets work fine on top of this, because Reversal deliberately leaves Colour Grading alone. Slide contrast plus a tungsten or blue-hour cast is a genuinely good combination. Silver doesn't mix, since it removes the colour this works on.

Slide film is the least forgiving thing I've built for, and there's a lot of room to have got the balance wrong. If something's off, say so. And if you make something with them, post it.