Kit

The others are Light packs — the conditions you shot in — or Stock packs, which make it look like a particular film. These are neither. They're the things you add on top.

Everything comes in Light, Normal and Heavy, so you decide how far to go rather than living with someone else's idea of tasteful. Nothing touches your exposure or white balance.

This is the second version. The first one had four tools in it at one strength each, and the honest verdict on it was that you couldn't see it. Fair. This one has bloom that's actually bloom, halation, three film processes, printer lights, and a heavy setting on everything that you can't miss.

My own work, straight out of this pack.

The first version of this pack had a preset called Veil and no bloom in it at all, which was a fair thing to be annoyed about. They're different effects.

Veiling glare is haze laid across the entire frame — light bouncing around inside the lens barrel. It lifts your blacks everywhere at once, including in a dark corner with nothing near it.

Bloom is local. A bright highlight spreads into what's immediately around it, and a dark corner across the frame is untouched. That's why a shot of a window at dusk glows around the window and stays clean elsewhere.

Doing it needs a highlight-selective effect, which needs a mask — and that's why it wasn't there. So it's here now, at three strengths, on a luminance mask that means the same thing on every photo regardless of crop or orientation.

These are the chemistry, and they're the biggest thing the old version was missing.

Film grain is a fixed physical size in the emulsion — a developed clump is about ten microns across. So how big it looks in your file depends entirely on how many pixels are spread across that 36mm frame.

Everyone sells it the other way, so it's worth saying plainly.

Vignetting is a property of the lens. Put the same lens on a film body and a digital one and the falloff is identical — film has no angular sensitivity to speak of. Format doesn't matter either: it depends only on the angle from the lens axis, so medium format with a normal lens comes out the same as 35mm with a normal lens.

So why does a vignette read as film? Because every analogue photograph you've ever seen was edge-burned by a printer. It was routine darkroom work — a few extra seconds into each corner to stop the eye wandering out of the frame, usually half a stop to a stop. The enlarger lens added its own falloff on top of that. Meanwhile modern digital cameras remove vignetting automatically, before you ever see the file.

The analogue pipeline added it twice. The digital pipeline deletes it. That's the whole reason one feels like film and the other doesn't — so this pack gives you both, honestly labelled.

A mist filter doesn't soften everything. Part of the light passes through completely untouched and the rest scatters into a halo — so what it actually does is take a fixed fraction out of the fine detail while leaving the coarse structure alone.

That's exactly why it works on a face. Pores, fine lines and blemishes are fine detail. The jawline, the cheekbone and the modelling from your key light are coarse structure. A blur destroys both and the face goes soft. Diffusion only touches the first, so the face stays sharp and the skin stops looking clinical.

The three grades match the real filter grades — roughly 10%, 20% and 40% of the light scattered away, leaving 90%, 80% and 60% of the fine detail.

Everyone lumps these together and they aren't the same at all.

Fade Dark Stored — a photo that sat in a box. The cyan and yellow dyes fail first and the magenta outlives them, so it drifts pink, with a yellow stain creeping into the highlights.

Fade Light Faded — a print that hung on a sunny wall. Under light it's the magenta that goes first, so it drifts the other way, toward green.

Both are weighted toward the shadows rather than being a flat cast, because dye loss follows the dye and a print carries most of its dye down there. A flat warm cast across the whole frame is the tell of a fake fade.

Acutance is only half the story. Film boosts the middle frequencies and then collapses at the fine end, as light scatters sideways in the gelatin. That collapse is as much a part of looking like film as the boost. Getting it needs your Sharpening turned down — and Sharpening is on the never-touch list for every pack here. So if you use slot 02, drop your own Sharpening to about 20 and you'll have the whole signature instead of half of it.

Grain isn't tone-weighted. Real film grain is strongest in the midtones and vanishes in pure black and pure white, for a structural reason — where the emulsion is fully developed or not developed at all, there's nothing left to fluctuate. Lightroom's grain is uniform across the whole range and there's no way to weight it from inside a preset. It's the most obvious digital tell in any Lightroom film look and I can't fix it.

The bleaches leave the primaries behind. They drain colour by pulling the Camera Calibration primaries down, because that's what neutral silver over a dye image actually does. Switch off a bleach to something else and the curve gets replaced but the primaries don't — reset Calibration too. It's the one wart in the pack.

Some of this isn't published by anyone. There's no manufacturer figure for how much contrast any silver-retention level adds, and none for fog at any push level. I went looking. Those two are shaped to the described behaviour rather than fitted to measurements — and so is everyone else's version.

One smaller thing: 03 Veil is the same effect as Nightfall's 01 Air. It's here so the Kit stands on its own — use one or the other, not both.

Every fix in this line has come from running the presets on real photos rather than from theory. If something's off, say so — and if you make something with them, post it.