EVOL 04 — REVERSAL
Slide film. Free Lightroom presets.
rezaevol.com


WHY THESE EXIST
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Slide film was made to be projected in a dark room. And a dark room needs
more contrast to look normal than a lit one does — that's a real, measured
thing about how eyes work, not a figure of speech.

You're looking at a screen, in a room with the lights on.

So the punchy, saturated, contrasty thing everyone loves about scanned
slides is partly a mismatch: you're seeing a rendering that was designed
for a blacked-out room, in a room that isn't. That's why the curve comes
in two versions rather than one.

    01a  PROJECTED   the film as designed. Full contrast.
    01b  ROOM        the same film, corrected for where you're
                     actually looking at it. About a quarter less.

Neither one is the "right" one. 01a is what the film did; 01b is what the
film was trying to look like.


HOW TO USE IT
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Set your white balance and exposure first. Then click one of the four
one-click looks and stop, or build it yourself:

    00a  Kodachrome      restrained, warm, good with people
    00b  Velvia          loud. Landscape. Not faces.
    00c  Provia          the sensible general-purpose one
    00d  Astia           the portrait chrome

Or:

    01   Curve   a Projected, or b Room
    02   Film    a Kodachrome, b Velvia, c Provia, d Astia
    03   Grain   a Chrome, or b Kodachrome

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

Everything has an Amount slider, 0–200%, and on this pack you'll want it.
Slide film is the least forgiving thing in the whole line.


THE ONE PLACE IN THIS LINE WHERE BLOWING THE HIGHLIGHTS IS CORRECT
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Every other Evol pack deliberately stops short of pure white, so you keep
somewhere to go with the Whites slider. This one doesn't, and there's a
reason.

A slide is a positive — you're looking at the actual film. Its white IS
clear film base, and past that there is nothing. You get about one stop of
gentle compression and then it stops dead. Overexposed slide is described
in the literature as punching holes in the picture, which is exactly what
it looks like.

So 01a hard-clips the whites, on purpose. If that bothers you, that's what
01b is for — once you've accepted you're not in a dark room, there's no
reason to keep throwing away the top stop.

The shadow end fails differently and more gently. There's real detail down
there on the film; most scanners just can't reach it. A lot of what people
call slide film's blocked shadows is actually the scanner giving up, not
the film.


WHICH FILM
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  02a  KODACHROME
       Restrained rather than punchy — which is what people actually mean
       when they call it elegant. Distinctive reds and oranges, warm dense
       shadows, and skies that sit a bit darker and lean toward cyan. The
       most photograph-like of the four, and much kinder to faces than
       Velvia.

  02b  VELVIA
       The loud one. Landscapes, detail, colour for its own sake.

       Not for faces. It pushes skin red, and that's authentic rather than
       a mistake — it's why nobody shot portraits on it. If you want to
       try it on a person anyway, drop the Amount to about 50% and it lands
       somewhere reasonable.

       Watch what it does to saturated reds: they get DARKER as they get
       more saturated, collapsing toward maroon. That's real Velvia
       behaviour and it's built in deliberately. Most presets claiming to
       be Velvia just raise saturation, which is the opposite of what the
       film did.

  02c  PROVIA
       The general-purpose chrome. Medium saturation, muted greens, and a
       cyan lean that runs through the whole range — Provia gets called
       neutral a lot but it never actually was. The safe choice when you
       want slide contrast without a colour statement.

  02d  ASTIA
       The portrait chrome, and the one to reach for if there are people
       in the frame. Gentler than the others, skin lifted very slightly,
       soft magenta in the shadows.

       Note that 00d is the only one-click look built on the Room curve
       rather than the Projected one. Slide film's contrast is most of
       what makes it hard on faces, so the preset meant for faces is the
       one that gives some of it back.


TWO THINGS I HAD WRONG
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Worth writing down, because I'd said both of them out loud before I
checked.

**"Slide film has no orange mask, so its layers line up and there's almost
no colour crossover."** Backwards. Slide film can't have a mask — the mask
is an overall colour cast, and on a negative you print through it, but a
slide IS the finished thing, so a mask would just make it orange. Which
means the colour errors a mask would have corrected are simply never
corrected at all.

And the crossover is real, and it lives in the SHADOWS. Kodak's own
processing tolerances allow the three layers to drift about 60% further
apart in the shadows than in the highlights. That's a manufacturer saying
out loud that slide shadows go colour-cast. So each film here gets its own
shadow tint rather than a shared one — Velvia green, Provia cyan, Astia
magenta, Kodachrome warm. Those directions come from field measurement,
not from taste.

**"Slide is gamma 1.6 and negative is 0.6, so build it three times as
contrasty."** A trap. A colour negative gets printed onto paper with a
gamma around 2.6, so the finished print lands at about 1.6 as well. The
difference between slide and negative isn't the final contrast at all —
it's the LATITUDE, and the shape of the two ends. That's what this pack is
actually encoding.


THE CURVE ISN'T AN S
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Fuji's own patents on reversal film specify the gradation numerically, and
the shape is lopsided: slope rises steadily from the highlights down into
the shadows. Soft at the top, steepest at the bottom.

That's the opposite of the S-curve most "film" presets use, and it's why
slide film looks the way it does — the shadows are where the contrast is.


WHAT THEY WON'T TOUCH
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    White Balance · Temperature · Tint
    Exposure · Contrast · Highlights · Shadows · Whites · Blacks
    Vibrance · Saturation · Sharpening
    Camera profile · Lens corrections · Crop · Masks
    Colour Grading — so Nightfall's illuminant presets still work on top


INSTALLING
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LIGHTROOM CLASSIC
  Develop → Presets panel → the + button → Import Presets.
  If nothing appears, quit Lightroom completely and reopen it.

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".

No paid Lightroom plan needed.


USING IT WITH THE OTHER PACKS
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Reversal and Emulsion are two different answers to the same question, so
they mostly replace each other rather than stacking — both write the tone
curve, the colour and the grain. Pick a pack, not a mixture.

Nightfall's 03 Illuminant works fine on top of this, because Reversal
deliberately leaves Colour Grading alone. That's a genuinely useful
combination for a slide look at dusk.

Silver doesn't mix, since it removes the colour this pack works 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
