EVOL 01 — EMULSION
The film look, one layer at a time. Free Lightroom presets.
rezaevol.com


WHY THESE EXIST
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Every preset I ever downloaded threw my work away. Get the white balance
right, get the exposure right, click a preset, and watch all of it
disappear — because the preset had an exposure baked in, and a contrast,
and a white balance, and it wrote every one over the top of mine.

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


WHAT THEY WILL NEVER TOUCH
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    White Balance · Temperature · Tint
    Exposure · Contrast · Highlights · Shadows · Whites · Blacks
    Vibrance · Saturation · Sharpening
    Camera profile · Process version · Parametric curve
    Lens corrections · Transform · Crop · Masks

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


HOW TO USE IT
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Same number = same job = pick ONE. Different numbers stack freely, and the
order doesn't matter.

    00   Full Look    the Kodak chain in one click
    01   Curve        a Negative, or b Faded
    02   Crossover    a Kodak, or b Fuji
    03   Colour       a Kodak Lean, or b Fuji Lean
    04   Glow         optional
    05   Halation     optional
    06   Grain        a Cubic, or b Tabular

Every preset works with Lightroom's Amount slider, 0–200%.


FOUR COMBINATIONS WORTH TRYING
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    Everyday Kodak      01a + 02a + 03a + 06a
                        Warm, forgiving, good skin. What 00 bakes in.

    Light & airy        01b + 02b + 03b + 04
                        Lifted blacks, mint greens, softer contrast.

    Night / tungsten    01a + 02a + 05 + 06b
                        Warm bleed in the highlights, coarser grain.

    If you only use two 02a + 06a
                        Crossover and grain carry more of it than the
                        curve does.


WHAT EACH ONE DOES
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  01a  CURVE — NEGATIVE
       Film highlights don't stop, they slow down. This rolls them off
       instead of letting them clip, and stops short of pure white so you
       still have room on the Whites slider.

  01b  CURVE — FADED
       Same slot, black point lifted. That washed look came from labs
       overexposing prints to rescue an underexposed negative — a printing
       habit, so it belongs in the curve rather than in your Blacks slider.

  02a  CROSSOVER — KODAK
       The one doing the real work. On film a grey in the shadows and a
       grey in the highlights are genuinely different colours — teal down
       low, gold up top. White balance can't do this, because it moves the
       whole range at once. It needs separate red, green and blue curves.

  02b  CROSSOVER — FUJI
       Same idea, the other house. Cool cyan shadows, mint midtones, clean
       highlights.

  03a  COLOUR — KODAK LEAN
       Colour Mixer only. Greens muted and pulled toward yellow, warm
       oranges, blues sitting back.

  03b  COLOUR — FUJI LEAN
       Greens and yellows rotated toward aqua and lifted. Where the
       eucalyptus green comes from.

  04   GLOW — VEILING
       A lens effect rather than a film one — the haze old glass throws
       across a frame. It's contrast that gets lost, not sharpness, which
       is why this leaves Sharpening completely alone.

  05   HALATION — WARM BLEED
       Being straight with you: this is a warm bleed in the highlights,
       not real halation. The real thing only appears where something
       bright sits against something dark, and a global slider can't know
       that. Evol 03 — Nightfall has the proper masked version.

  06a  GRAIN — CUBIC
       The clumpier kind — Tri-X, HP5, Portra. Film grain sits at random
       sizes in random places; digital noise sits on a grid. That's the
       whole difference between texture that looks like material and
       texture that looks like a problem.

  06b  GRAIN — TABULAR
       The flatter crystal — T-Max, Delta, cinema stocks. Bigger grain,
       less clumping, so it reads cleaner even though there's more of it.

Both grain presets also ease Colour Noise Reduction down slightly, because
Lightroom's grain is black and white only while real colour grain carries
colour variation too. At very high ISO, just put it back up.


THE TWO CLASSIC-ONLY EXTRAS
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07a and 07b live in a second folder. They use the Calibration panel, which
only exists in Lightroom Classic — it's the deepest colour control
Lightroom has, and it works before everything else in the pipeline.

Install that folder only if you're on Classic. On desktop or mobile they'll
just show up greyed out.


INSTALLING
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LIGHTROOM CLASSIC
  Develop → Presets panel → the + button → Import Presets.
  If nothing appears, 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 option 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. No paid Lightroom plan
needed.


USING IT WITH THE OTHER PACKS
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Nightfall stacks on this fine. A few things write the same setting, so
whichever you click last wins: the curves (Emulsion 01, Nightfall 02), the
grain (both 06), Emulsion 02 against Nightfall 05, and Emulsion 04 Glow
against Nightfall 01 Air.

Silver mostly doesn't mix, since it removes the colour these work on.


LICENCE
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Free. Use it on anything you shoot — personal, client, prints, commercial.
No attribution required, though it is always nice.

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

Provided as-is. You keep every right to the photographs you make.

© 2026 Reza Evol · rezaevol.com
