EVOL 01 — EMULSION
A modular film-look preset pack for Adobe Lightroom
rezaevol.com


WHAT THIS IS
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Eleven presets that each own one stage of the photochemical process, plus
two Lightroom Classic extras.

They are built to STACK. Each one writes only the settings it is
responsible for, so applying several in a row does not undo any of them —
and none of them touch the work you did yourself.


YOU DO NOT APPLY ALL ELEVEN
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The number at the front of each name is the rule.

    Same number = same job = pick ONE.
    Different numbers stack freely.

    00   Full Look     a shortcut for the Everyday Kodak chain — use
                       INSTEAD of 01/02/03/06, not alongside them.
                       Glow and Halation still stack on top of it.
    01   Curve         a or b, or neither
    02   Crossover     a or b, or neither
    03   Colour        a or b, or neither
    04   Glow          on or off
    05   Halation      on or off
    06   Grain         a or b, or neither

So a real edit is three or four clicks, not eleven:

    1. Set your white balance and exposure however you normally would.
    2. Click 01a Curve - Negative.
    3. Click 02a Crossover - Kodak.   (the curve from step 2 stays)
    4. Click 06a Grain - Cubic.       (both previous ones stay)

Your exposure from step 1 never moved.

If you click 02a and then click 02b, the second one replaces the first —
they both write the same red/green/blue curves, so there is nothing to
stack. That is what "pick one" means.

There are eleven files for what is really six decisions because Lightroom
has no concept of a preset with options. Each variant has to be its own
file.


THE GUARANTEE
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
No preset in this pack writes any of the following. Set them however you
like, before or after applying — auto or by hand, they will survive:

    White Balance · Temperature · Tint
    Exposure · Contrast · Highlights · Shadows · Whites · Blacks
    Vibrance · Saturation
    Sharpening (all four sliders)
    Camera profile · Process version
    Parametric tone curve
    Lens corrections · Transform · Crop · Masks

This matters more than it sounds. Most presets are exported from
Lightroom's own "New Preset" dialog, which writes every checked panel —
including sliders that were never moved. A preset written that way sets
Clarity to 0 rather than leaving it alone, and it wipes your exposure
work the moment you click it. Evol 01 is generated from a script with a
test that fails the build if any protected setting appears in any file.

One nice side effect: because nothing in the pack is a mode switch, a
mask, a lens toggle or a camera profile, every single preset supports
Lightroom's Amount slider. Drag it from 0 to 200%.


FOUR CHAINS TO START FROM
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Everyday Kodak     01a + 02a + 03a + 06a
  Light & airy       01b + 02b + 03b + 04
  Night / tungsten   01a + 02a + 05  + 06b
  Just the two       02a + 06a
                     (crossover and grain carry more of the illusion
                      than the tone curve does)


INSTALLING
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
LIGHTROOM CLASSIC
  Develop module → Presets panel → the + button → Import Presets…
  Select the .zip, or the two folders inside it.

  If nothing appears: quit Lightroom completely and reopen it. Classic
  only indexes presets at startup. This is the cause of nearly every
  "it didn't work" email.

LIGHTROOM DESKTOP (cloud)
  File → Import Profiles & Presets… → select the .zip or the .xmp files.

LIGHTROOM MOBILE (iOS / Android)
  Open any photo → Edit → Presets → tap "Yours" → the three-dot menu →
  Import Presets.

  The import option lives ONLY under "Yours". It is not under
  Recommended or Premium, and not inside a preset group. This trips up
  almost everyone.

  Recent iOS builds accept the .zip directly. Older ones need the loose
  .xmp files, which is why both are in this download.

  No paid Lightroom plan is needed. These are tone, colour and grain
  presets — they work on the free mobile app.

IF YOU CANNOT SEE THE NUMBERS
  Widen the Presets panel. When it is narrow, Lightroom shows a shortened
  name instead of the full one. Both carry the slot number in this pack,
  so you should see "01a Negative" at worst — but if you are seeing bare
  names with no numbers at all, you have an older build. Re-download.


WHAT'S IN THE BOX
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Evol 01 — Emulsion/                    ← works everywhere

  00 Full Look
       The Everyday Kodak chain in one click — identical to clicking
       01a, 02a, 03a and 06a yourself. Still writes none of your own
       white balance, exposure or tone.

       It deliberately leaves out Glow and Halation. Those two are the
       most opinionated presets here, and stacking both into the
       one-click option made it heavy-handed on whites and skin. Add
       them on top when a photo wants them.

  01a Curve - Negative
       Master tone curve only. Film's shoulder starts about two and a
       half stops above middle grey and then asymptotes — it never hits
       a wall the way a sensor does. This curve synthesises that and
       deliberately stops short of pure white, so you keep Whites
       headroom on every frame.

  01b Curve - Faded
       Same slot, lifted black point. Worth knowing: the faded vintage
       look is not a property of film at all. Minilabs overexposed the
       print to rescue underexposed negatives, which lifted the dark
       tones and lost true black. It is a printing technique, so it
       belongs in the curve rather than in your Blacks slider.

  02a Crossover - Kodak
  02b Crossover - Fuji
       Per-channel red, green and blue curves. This is the module doing
       the real work. Colour film has three emulsion layers, each with
       its own characteristic curve, so a neutral grey at one density is
       not neutral at another — the shadows and the highlights genuinely
       carry different colour. That is called crossover, and it cannot
       be reproduced with Temperature and Tint, because a white balance
       move shifts the whole range uniformly.

       Kodak: teal-green shadows, golden highlights.
       Fuji:  cool cyan shadows, mint midtones, clean highlights.

       Both converge at the top end, which gives you the other thing
       film does and sensors do not — saturation falling smoothly toward
       white as you approach the shoulder, instead of climbing until it
       clips.

  03a Colour - Kodak Lean
  03b Colour - Fuji Lean
       Colour Mixer only, all eight channels. Where 02 bends the neutral
       axis, 03 handles specific hues. Neither touches Vibrance or
       Saturation.

  04 Glow - Veiling
       Not a film effect — a lens one. Every uncoated air-glass surface
       reflects four to five percent, and a six-element uncoated lens
       has twelve of them. The scattered light becomes a haze across the
       frame. Crucially this is contrast loss, not resolution loss, so
       this module drops Texture, Clarity and Dehaze and leaves
       Sharpening completely alone.

  05 Halation - Warm Bleed
       Being straight with you: this is a warm highlight bleed, not
       simulated halation. Real halation is light passing through the
       emulsion, bouncing off the back of the film base and re-exposing
       the emulsion from behind — a second exposure, not a glow. It is
       red-orange because the red-sensitive layer sits deepest, closest
       to the reflecting surface. It also only appears where a bright
       source sits in a dark surround, which a global slider cannot
       know about. A luminance mask can, but masks inside a preset merge
       rather than replace — apply the pack twice and you would have two
       of them, with no way to clear them. So this is the honest
       version. Real masked halation is coming in a later pack.

  06a Grain - Cubic
  06b Grain - Tabular
       Film grain is not noise added to a clean image. Each silver
       halide crystal either develops fully or not at all, and they sit
       at random positions in random sizes, clumping where they overlap.
       Digital noise sits on a fixed square grid. That is the whole
       difference between texture that reads as material and texture
       that reads as contamination.

       Cubic   — Tri-X, HP5, Portra 400. Clumps more.
       Tabular — T-Max, Delta, Vision3. Bigger, cleaner, less clumping.

       Both ease Colour Noise Reduction down from Lightroom's default.
       Lightroom's grain is luminance-only, but real colour grain is dye
       clouds in three independently-graining layers, so it carries
       colour variation too. Letting a trace of your file's own chroma
       noise through stands in for that. If you are working at very high
       ISO and it looks like too much, put Colour Noise Reduction back
       up — you are not undoing anything else.


Evol 01 — Emulsion (Classic only)/     ← Lightroom Classic ONLY

  07a Calibration - Kodak Primaries
  07b Calibration - Fuji Primaries
       These rotate the RGB primaries themselves, before everything else
       in the pipeline. It is the deepest colour control Lightroom has
       and the most faithful place to do crossover.

       The catch: the Calibration panel does not exist in cloud or
       mobile Lightroom. Import these there and they will show up
       greyed out and italic, or not at all. That is why they are in
       their own folder — install this one only if you use Classic.

       Stack 07a under 02a, or 07b under 02b.


LICENCE
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Evol 01 is free. Use it on anything you shoot — personal work, client
work, prints, commercial jobs. No attribution required, though it is
always nice.

Please don't resell the preset files or include them in a paid bundle,
re-host the download elsewhere (link to rezaevol.com instead, so people
get the current version), or repackage them under another name.

Provided as-is, with no warranty. You keep every right to the
photographs you make with them.

© 2026 Reza Evol · rezaevol.com
