EVOL TOOLS — KIT
Free Lightroom presets from Reza Evol · rezaevol.com


WHAT THIS IS

The finishing pack. Bloom, halation, grain, vignettes, diffusion, film
processes and print effects — the things you add when a picture is nearly
there and needs a bit more.

54 presets. Everything comes in Light, Normal and Heavy, so you pick how
far you want to go rather than living with somebody else's idea of tasteful.

Nothing here touches your exposure or your white balance. Set those first,
then stack whatever you want on top.


INSTALLING

Lightroom Classic:  File > Import Develop Profiles & Presets, pick the zip.
Lightroom (cloud):  Edit > Presets > the three dots > Import Presets.

No need to unzip. Two groups appear — "Evol Tools — Kit" and
"Evol Tools — Kit (masked)". The second one is five presets that add a mask;
read the warning further down before using them.


THE SLOTS

  01  SOFT — DIFFUSION       Light / Normal / Heavy
      A mist filter. Skin softens, the jawline doesn't. That's the whole
      trick: it takes the fine detail and leaves the coarse structure,
      which is the opposite of what a blur does.

  02  SOFT — ACUTANCE        Light / Normal / Heavy
      The other direction, and the reason film looks sharper than it
      measures. Film develops with a density overshoot right at an edge.
      Pick 01 or 02, not both — they're two signs of the same control.

  03  VEIL                   Light / Normal / Heavy
      Scattered light across the whole frame, like an old uncoated lens.
      This is haze, not bloom. Different thing, see below.

  04  EDGE                   9 presets
      Print Burn (L/N/H)     — what a darkroom printer actually did
      Optical Wide/Normal/Tele — real lens falloff by focal length
      Lift (L/N/H)           — corners going milky instead of dark

  05  GRAIN                  4 sizes × 3 amounts
      12MP / 24MP / 45MP / 61MP+, each in Light, Normal and Heavy.
      Pick the size that matches your camera. See "grain" below.

  06  PROCESS                16 presets
      Push +1/+2/+3          — forced development
      Bleach Print (L/N/H)   — silver retained in the print, the ENR look
      Bleach Negative        — the same chemistry the other way round
      Rolloff (L/N/H)        — a film shoulder on the highlights
      Printer Warm / Cool    — a lab colour head, not a WB slider
      Fade Dark (N/H)        — a print that sat in a box
      Fade Light (N/H)       — a print that hung on a sunny wall

      READ THIS: everything in 06 works by rewriting the three colour
      curves, and Lightroom has one set of those. So these replace each
      other — and they replace Emulsion's crossover and Reversal's
      gradation too. Use one of them, on its own. Every other slot in this
      pack still stacks on everything.

  00  A LITTLE MORE          Light / Normal / Heavy
      One click. Acutance, veil, a corner burn and grain, together.
      No masks and no colour curves, so these three stack on any other
      Evol pack safely.

  M   BLOOM AND HALATION     5 presets, and they add masks
      Bloom (L/N/H) and Halation (Normal/Heavy).


THE MASK WARNING

Lightroom MERGES a preset's masks with whatever masks are already on the
photo. Always. No preset can remove one.

So: apply a masked preset twice and you have two copies to delete by hand.
Apply two of them and you have two masks, which is fine and intended — but
they don't replace each other. If a photo starts looking strange, open the
Masking panel and see what's piled up in there.

The one-click looks contain no masks, deliberately.


BEING STRAIGHT ABOUT A FEW THINGS

BLOOM ISN'T REAL BLOOM. A true bloom puts light OUTSIDE the highlight,
into the dark pixels next to it. That needs a spatial blur applied per
channel, and Lightroom has no such control at any level — not globally, not
in a mask. What these do is soften and open the highlight and its immediate
surround. It reads convincingly at normal viewing size. It isn't the same
physics, and I'd rather say so than sell you a word.

Same goes for halation. If you're using Nightfall, its M1 and M2 split it
into the two real mechanisms and are better than the ones here.

GRAIN CAN'T BE WEIGHTED BY TONE. Real graininess peaks in the midtones and
falls off in the deep shadows and the highlights. Every serious film tool —
Dehancer, FilmBox, FilmConvert — gives you separate grain for shadows, mids
and highlights. Lightroom's Grain is global only and can't go inside a mask.
There's no workaround. Four sizes and three amounts is all that can be built.

ACUTANCE IS ONLY HALF THE STORY. Film's response rises above 100% at the
middle frequencies and then collapses at the fine end. Slot 02 does the
lift. For the collapse, turn your own Sharpening down — this pack never
touches it.

And a related thing worth knowing, because most advice gets it backwards:
you can't do film's edge effect with the Sharpening panel. The adjacency
effect lives around 10 lp/mm, which on a 24MP frame is about an 8 pixel
radius. Lightroom's Sharpening Radius stops at 3.0. Texture is the right
control, which is why that's what these use.

THE BLEACHES LEAVE THE PRIMARIES BEHIND. Bleach bypass drains colour by
laying neutral silver over the dye image, so the four bleach presets pull
the Camera Calibration primaries down. If you switch off a bleach to
something else, reset Calibration too — the curve gets replaced, the
primaries don't. It's the one wart in the pack and I'd rather flag it.

NOBODY PUBLISHES SOME OF THIS. There is no manufacturer gamma figure for
any silver-retention level, and no fog figure for any push level. I looked.
The bleach contrast and the push fog are shaped to the described behaviour
rather than fitted to measurements — and so is everybody else's.

IF YOUR FILE IS NOISY, DENOISE BEFORE YOU ADD GRAIN. Digital sensor noise
is uncorrelated pixel to pixel; film grain is clumped. Stacking one on the
other reads as mud rather than as emulsion. There's no preset for this on
purpose — how much denoising a file needs depends on the file, and a preset
guessing at it would do more harm than good.


GRAIN SIZE

A developed grain clump is about 10 microns across, always. So how big it
is in PIXELS depends entirely on your file:

    12MP  1.18 px        45MP  2.29 px
    24MP  1.67 px        61MP  2.64 px

A preset authored on a 24MP body renders grain about 1.6× too small on a
61MP one. That's why grain presets so often look wrong — the grain was
sized for somebody else's camera. Pick the one matching yours.


A SUGGESTED ORDER

  1. Your own exposure and white balance
  2. A Light pack (Daylight or Nightfall) if the conditions need it
  3. A Stock pack (Emulsion, Silver or Reversal) if you want a film look
  4. From here: 01 or 02, then 03, then 04, then 05
  5. One 06 preset — but only if you skipped step 3
  6. A masked bloom or halation last


TELL ME WHEN IT'S WRONG

The first version of this pack was too timid and somebody said so, which is
the only reason this one exists. So if something's off, say so.

@rezaevol on Threads.


LICENCE

Free to use, including commercially. See LICENSE.txt.
© 2026 Reza Evol · rezaevol.com
