EVOL 02 — SILVER
Black and white, tuned for faces. Free Lightroom presets.
rezaevol.com


WHY THESE EXIST
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Lightroom's default black and white conversion leans almost entirely on
the green channel — and green is where blemishes, redness and veins show
up strongest. The smooth, even part of skin lives in the red, which the
default mostly throws away.

It's doing to a face exactly what a green filter does, which is the one
filter every portrait guide tells you not to use. That's the whole reason
this pack exists.


HOW TO USE IT
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Two clicks minimum.

    1. Set your white balance and exposure however you normally would.

       White balance still matters in black and white — the conversion
       reads the colours underneath, so your colour work feeds it rather
       than being thrown away.

    2. Click 01 Mono. That just flips the photo to black and white.

    3. Pick ONE filter from 02. This is the decision that matters.

    4. Optionally add a curve from 03 and grain from 04.

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

    00   Full Look    mono + yellow + Tri-X + fine grain, one click
    01   Mono         the switch. Always first.
    02   Filter       a through g — pick one
    03   Curve        a, b or c, or neither
    04   Grain        a or b, or neither


THE ONE PRESET WITHOUT AN AMOUNT SLIDER
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01 Mono, and 00 Full Look which contains it. Everything else scales from
0 to 200%.

There's no halfway state between colour and black and white, so a switch
can't have a slider. That's also why the switch is a separate file from
the filters — if each filter carried its own switch, every filter would
lose its Amount slider too. One extra click keeps all seven scalable.


WHICH FILTER
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Start with Yellow. Go warmer for smoother skin, cooler for more texture.

  02a  NONE — PANCHROMATIC
       What black and white film actually looks like with no filter on the
       lens. Skies go pale. Accurate rather than flattering.

  02b  YELLOW — Wratten 8
       The safe one, and where to start. Skin lifts gently, blemishes
       soften a little, sky darkens a little. Hard to go wrong with, on any
       complexion.

  02c  YELLOW-GREEN — Wratten 11
       Keeps skin texture instead of smoothing it. The classic choice for
       men and character faces.

       Fair warning: it makes redness, sunburn, acne and stubble more
       obvious, not less. Lovely on clear skin, unkind on ruddy skin. It
       also lifts foliage toward your subject's own tone, so it helps
       separation against a sky and hurts it against a hedge.

  02d  ORANGE — Wratten 21
       The portrait smoother. Freckles and blemishes drop away and skin
       reads clean and even. Traditionally the studio filter.

       Costs: it can go a bit plastic on very fair skin, and it washes
       lips out toward skin tone.

  02e  RED — Wratten 25
       Porcelain. Blemishes basically vanish. A deliberate look, not a
       default.

       Costs, all real: lips disappear into the face, hair goes dark, and
       the eyes sink — the shadowed area around them is lit mostly by blue
       skylight, which this filter removes, so the cheeks lift and the eyes
       don't.

  02f  ORTHO — the silent film look
       Reds render dark. Lips go nearly black, freckles and blemishes
       plunge, skin darkens overall. This is what film looked like before
       the late 1920s — actors wore blue lipstick so it would read as grey.

       Deliberately unflattering, and superb on graphic, weathered,
       documentary faces. See the note below before using it on darker
       skin.

  02g  EXTENDED RED — infrared territory
       Skin glows like it's lit from under the surface rather than
       reflecting off it, and veins, blemishes, pigment and wrinkles all
       fade at once. Foliage lifts too.

       Blue eyes go very dark. That's the signature, and the giveaway.


A NOTE ON SKIN TONE
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Red and orange filtration brings different complexions CLOSER TOGETHER.
Green and blue pushes them FURTHER APART.

  · Red and orange lift darker skin and reduce its contrast. Equalising —
    but it can read flat or ashy, because the variation that gives deep
    skin its life is exactly what's been removed.

  · Green, blue and ortho drive darker skin down hard, and can take it
    below the point where it holds detail.

  · Extended red is the most equalising of the lot. As a deliberate effect
    that's genuinely useful. As a "fix" it isn't.

Every filter here was checked against light, medium, brown and deep skin,
and all of them hold darker skin properly EXCEPT ORTHO, which drives it
down below where it holds detail. That's authentic to the film, and it's
why ortho wants a deliberate exposure decision rather than a click.

One practical note: on darker skin the usual problem is bright specular
highlights, not the shadows. A highlight roll-off matters more than a
shadow lift, which is the opposite of what most people assume — and it's
what the Tri-X curve gives you.


BEING STRAIGHT ABOUT A LIMITATION
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Real glass filters and Lightroom's colour mixer don't work the same way.
A real orange filter can hold skin's overall tone while trimming just the
narrow band a blemish sits in. A slider can't, because a blemish and the
skin around it are the SAME colour at different strengths. Push Orange up
and you lighten both together.

These filters do move blemish contrast in the right direction — roughly
−24% for extended red, −18% for red, −8% for orange — but it's nothing
like screwing real glass onto a lens. What this pack reliably gives you is
correct overall RENDERING: where each complexion sits, how the tones
relate, and a curve that doesn't fight the face. Actual blemish work needs
a mask, and a preset can't ship one that behaves.


THE CURVES, AND WHY NONE OF THEM IS AN S
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An S-curve steepens exactly where skin sits, which does two bad things to
a portrait at once: every blotch, beard shadow and under-eye gets louder,
and the extreme highlights and shadows — where the SHAPE of a face lives —
get flattened. You gain the contrast you don't want and lose the contrast
you do.

So all three of these run nearly straight through the skin range and build
their contrast above and below it.

  03a  TRI-X    Rolls off the highlights so a lit cheek doesn't clip, with
                deep blacks underneath. The forgiving one — best when
                there's a white dress or shirt in frame.

  03b  HP5      Longer toe, much less shoulder. More separation on the
                shadow side of a face. Renders neutrally.

  03c  DELTA    Renders skin literally, every pore separated at the same
                rate as everything else. Less forgiving, more controllable.


GRAIN
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Grain in the MIDTONES helps a face — it breaks up smooth light and hides
small blemishes under competing texture. Grain on the SHADOW SIDE of a
face hurts, because that's where you need an unbroken gradient to carry
the shape of the skull.

Lightroom's grain does both at once and can't be masked from inside a
preset, which is why 04a is conservative. 04b is a look, and it's better
on a wide or full-length frame than a close portrait.


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 your own toning survives

The one deliberate exception: this pack writes the black and white switch,
because flipping it is the entire point.


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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Silver mostly doesn't mix with Emulsion or Nightfall, since it removes the
colour they work on. Where it does overlap — the curves and the grain —
whichever you click last wins.

Silver deliberately leaves Colour Grading alone, so if you tone your black
and whites, your toning survives everything here.


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
