Free Lightroom presets

Evol 01

— Emulsion —

Eleven presets that build the film look one layer at a time — and never overwrite your work.

.xmp · Lightroom Classic, desktop & mobile · 20 KB · no signup

Why these exist

Every preset I ever downloaded threw my work away

The routine was always the same. Get the white balance where I wanted it. Get the exposure right. Then click a preset and watch all of it disappear — because the preset had an exposure value baked in, and a contrast value, and a white balance, and it wrote every one of them over the top of mine.

So you undo, and you go looking for a different preset, and that one does it too. After a while you stop using them and just do everything by hand.

These are the ones I built for myself instead. Each one does exactly one job — the tone curve, or the colour, or the grain — and writes nothing else. You get your own base right first, then stack whichever ones you want on top. Nothing overwrites anything.

They're free because this site isn't selling anything. If they're useful, use them.

What they will never touch

White Balance
Temperature
Tint
Exposure
Contrast
Highlights
Shadows
Whites
Blacks
Vibrance
Saturation
Sharpening
Camera profile
Lens corrections
Crop
Masks

Set those however you like, before or after. Auto or by hand. They'll survive.

How it works

Numbered by slot, so you can see what collides

Presets are grouped by number. Same number means same job — pick at most one. Different numbers stack freely, and the order you click them in doesn't matter.

There's also a 00 Full Look for the days you don't want to think about it. It's the whole Kodak chain in one click, and it still leaves your exposure and white balance alone.

One more thing worth knowing: every preset in the pack works with Lightroom's Amount slider, so you can dial any of them from 0 to 200%. That only works when a preset contains nothing but sliders — one baked-in black & white switch or lens toggle greys it out for the whole file. Which is part of why there's no black & white in this pack.

On real files

Before and after

Drag to compare. Shot raw, base exposure and white balance set by hand first, then the presets stacked on top — nothing else done to them.

Before — white balance and exposure set, no presets applied

After — Everyday Kodak chain stacked on the same base

After — Light and airy chain stacked on the same base

After — Night and tungsten chain stacked on the same base

Somewhere to start

Four combinations worth trying

Everyday Kodak

01a + 02a + 03a + 06a

Warm, forgiving, good skin. This is what 00 Full Look bakes in.

Light & airy

01b + 02b + 03b + 04

Lifted blacks, mint greens, softer contrast. Outdoor portraits.

Night / tungsten

01a + 02a + 05 + 06b

Warm bleed in the highlights, coarser grain. Skip the colour mixer so neon stays neon.

If you only use two

02a + 06a

Crossover and grain carry more of the illusion than the tone curve does.

What's in the pack

Eleven presets, and what each one actually does

Full Look

The Kodak chain in one click. Still writes none of your own white balance, exposure or tone — so even the lazy option can't wreck anything.

01a

Curve — Negative

Master tone curve only. Film's highlights don't stop, they slow down — the response starts compressing about two and a half stops above middle grey and then just keeps approaching the top without ever arriving. A sensor fills up and quits. This curve builds that shoulder in, and deliberately tops out short of pure white so you still have somewhere to go with the Whites slider.

01b

Curve — Faded instead of 01a

Same slot, black point lifted. Worth knowing that the faded look isn't really a film thing at all — labs used to overexpose the print to rescue an underexposed negative, which lifted the dark tones and lost true black. It's a printing habit. So it belongs in the curve, not in your Blacks slider.

02a

Crossover — Kodak

This is the one doing the real work. Colour film has three layers stacked on top of each other, and they don't respond identically — so a grey in the shadows and a grey in the highlights are genuinely different colours. Teal-green down low, gold up top. You cannot do this with Temperature and Tint, because white balance moves the whole range at once. It needs separate red, green and blue curves, which is what this is.

02b

Crossover — Fuji instead of 02a

Same idea, the other house. Cool cyan in the shadows, mint through the midtones, highlights kept clean. Both versions pull the three channels back together at the very top, which gives you the other thing film does and digital doesn't — colour draining smoothly toward white as you climb into the highlights, instead of getting more saturated until it clips.

03a

Colour — Kodak Lean

Colour Mixer only, all eight channels. Where 02 bends the greys, this handles specific hues — greens muted and pulled toward yellow, warm oranges, blues sitting back. Doesn't touch Vibrance or Saturation.

03b

Colour — Fuji Lean instead of 03a

Greens and yellows rotated toward aqua and lifted. That's the whole move, and it's where the eucalyptus green comes from.

Glow — Veiling

Not a film effect — a lens one. Every uncoated glass surface throws back four or five percent of the light, and an old six-element lens has twelve of those surfaces. All that scattered light becomes a haze across the frame. The important part: it's contrast that's lost, not sharpness. So this drops Texture, Clarity and Dehaze and leaves Sharpening completely alone, which is the bit most vintage-lens presets get backwards.

Halation — Warm Bleed

Being straight with you: this is a warm bleed in the highlights, not real halation. Real halation is light going through the emulsion, bouncing off the back of the film base and exposing the film a second time from behind — that's why it's red-orange, and why it only shows up where something bright sits against something dark. A global slider can't know that. A mask could, but masks inside a preset pile up instead of replacing each other, and nothing can clear them afterwards. So this is the honest version. The real one is coming in a later pack.

06a

Grain — Cubic

Grain isn't noise sprinkled on a clean picture — the crystals are the sensor. Each one either develops or it doesn't, and they sit at random sizes in random places, clumping where they overlap. Digital noise sits on a fixed square grid. That's the entire difference between texture that looks like material and texture that looks like a problem. This variant is the clumpier kind: Tri-X, HP5, Portra.

06b

Grain — Tabular instead of 06a

The flatter crystal shape — T-Max, Delta, cinema stocks. Bigger grain, but far less clumping, so it reads cleaner even though there's more of it. Both grain presets also ease Colour Noise Reduction down a little, because Lightroom's grain is black and white only and real colour grain carries colour variation too. If you're at very high ISO and it's too much, just put it back up — you won't undo anything else.

There are two extras in a second folder — 07a and 07b, Calibration. They're the deepest colour control Lightroom has, but that panel only exists in Lightroom Classic. Install that folder only if you're on Classic; on mobile or desktop they'll just show up greyed out.

Installing

Three minutes, depending on where you edit

Lightroom Classic

Develop module → Presets panel → the + button → Import Presets. Point it at the zip.

If nothing shows up — quit Lightroom completely and reopen it. Classic only looks for presets at startup. That's nearly every "it didn't work" email.

Lightroom desktop (cloud)

File → Import Profiles & Presets → select the zip.

Lightroom mobile

Open a photo → Edit → Presets → tap Yours → three-dot menu → Import Presets.

The import button only lives under "Yours". Not Recommended, not Premium, not inside a group. This one catches everybody.

Newer iPhone builds take the zip straight. Older ones want the loose .xmp files, which is why both are in the download. You don't need a paid Lightroom plan — these are just tone, colour and grain, so they work on the free app.

Where this is going

Evol 01 is the first of a few

Each pack takes one part of the process further. They're all built the same way, so anything from a later pack stacks on anything from this one.

Evol 02 — Silver

Black & white. It's not in this pack because it's a switch rather than a layer — the one thing that can't stack, and it disables the Amount slider on any preset containing it. It also deserves the room: the classic filter conversions (yellow, orange, red, green, and an orthochromatic one) are a pack on their own.

Evol 03 — Nightfall

Tungsten and night. Real masked halation, teal-shifted greens, blue shadows. Lightroom Classic first, because this is where masks earn their keep.

Evol 04 — Reversal

Slide film. The interesting inversion — slide has no orange mask, so its layers line up and there's almost no crossover at all. It's the one family where a hard highlight clip is the accurate answer.

Tell me what's wrong with them

These are a first pass

If something doesn't work — a preset that's too heavy, one that's missing, a film stock you want — say so. This pack has already been through a few versions because things kept turning up on real photos: skin going red on a groom, green creeping into the shadows of a night shot. Neither showed up until someone actually used them. That's the kind of note that's useful.

And if you make something with them, post it. I'd like to see what they do on someone else's pictures.

@rezaevol find me on Threads

The fine print, briefly

Use them on anything

Personal work, client work, prints, commercial jobs — all fine, no attribution needed, though it's always nice. Just please don't resell the files, put them in a paid bundle, or re-host the download somewhere else. Link back here instead so people get the current version. Provided as-is; every photo you make with them is entirely yours.

that's it — go make something

Download Evol 01

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