Why film emulation, and why these
Most preset packs are somebody's colour grade with a film name attached. These started from
the stocks themselves — how Portra rolls off in the highlights and stays kind to skin,
how Velvia pushes greens and blues until a landscape looks like a memory of itself, how Tri-X
holds its grain structure and its contrast at the same time.
That means they behave like film does. Underexpose Portra 400 and it goes muddy in the
shadows, the way it does on a real roll. Shoot Velvia into a flat grey sky and it won't rescue
you. You'll adjust exposure and white balance per image — and that's the point, because
the result ends up looking like your photograph rather than everybody else's filter.
My father handed me my first camera in 1978, when I was eleven — a Nikon F2a. Did I
know what I was doing? Absolutely not. But back then the films of choice were Kodachrome 64
and Tri-X 400, and these presets began as my memory of how those two films looked.
I turned professional in the mid-1990s, which I'd argue was photography's golden era
— and where this set gets its name. Digital existed, but it was in its infancy and not
yet commercially viable, so the work still went through film. Thirty years on I'm still
chasing that feel, with the tools we have now rather than the ones we had then.
Almost every look ships twice: once as a Lightroom .xmp preset, once as a
Capture One .costyle. One purchase covers both, so switching editors doesn't cost
you the set. The one exception is Kodak Aerochrome EIR — the false-colour channel swap
real infrared film performs can't be built out of ordinary sliders, so it ships as a Lightroom
profile instead, with an Amount slider for dialling the effect back. Capture One has no
equivalent to the profile system that relies on, so that single look is Lightroom-only.
