How to Choose Film Presets for Lightroom
Search for film presets and you'll find hundreds. Almost all of them promise you "the Portra look". I'd rather be honest with you: there is no such thing. A roll of Portra scanned on a Frontier looks different from the same roll on a Noritsu, and different again as a lab print. It's all a matter of interpretation, and for me that's what keeps analog photography alive.
So when you buy a film preset, you buy somebody's interpretation of a film. That's worth knowing before you spend any money. Here's how I look at it.
What a preset can change
A simple preset moves sliders: exposure, contrast, tone curve, color mixer. It sits on top of Adobe's default color rendering, and that rendering was never made to look like film.
A profile starts one step earlier. It changes the color rendering your sliders start from. Almost everything I build begins with linear lab data, real scans from a Fujifilm Frontier SP3000 and a Noritsu HS 1800, the machines that quietly defined how film looked in print for decades. The Gold Edition, for example, comes with 12 profiles, tuned for normal, pushed and pulled exposure.
Whoever makes your presets, ask what they're based on and whether they tell you. It's a fair question.
The four families
Color negative
Color negative is the everyday film: warm, forgiving, kind to skin. Kodak Portra, Kodak Gold, Fuji Superia. If you photograph people in daylight, start here. The Classic Film Presets 2021 are the big toolbox for it, over 50 presets, each with over- and underexposed versions, because film was never one-size-fits-all. If you'd rather go deep on one stock, there's the Gold Edition (Kodak Gold 200 and UltraMax 400) and the Kodacolor Edition.
Slide film
Slide film is saturated, contrasty and not very forgiving. Kodachrome is the one I couldn't shake. I started too late with photography to shoot it myself, so I tried to build it. Classic K14 (2024) covers Kodachrome 25, 64 and 200 with 10 presets and 4 profiles. The 2021 collection adds Velvia, Provia and Astia.
Motion picture film
Motion picture film has its own color. The tungsten stocks wrap artificial light in a warmth digital sensors chase but rarely catch, and the daylight stocks render shadows smoothly. Classic Vision 3 covers Kodak Vision 3 in 50D, 200T, 250D, 500T and a C41-processed 500T. Classic ECN-2 2025 does the same for CineStill 50D, 400D and 800T.
Black and white
Black and white lives from grain, contrast and tonal separation. The 2021 collection has Acros 100, HP5 Plus, Delta, Tri-X 400 and T-Max 3200.
Lightroom Classic or Lightroom CC?
Lightroom Classic is the desktop version. My presets work in Lightroom Classic, in the cloud-based Lightroom CC and in Adobe Camera Raw, and Lightroom Mobile works through sync with a desktop installation. They aren't tied to a camera brand, any raw file Lightroom or Camera Raw can open will do. If you work in Capture One, there are Styles and ICC profiles for that too.
How I'd choose
Start with what you photograph. Portraits and everyday life suit color negative, landscapes and street photography often suit slide film or cinema stocks.
Try a free one first. My "Almost Free" presets cost €5, and the €5 comes back as a voucher. Test them on your own photos before you buy more, ideally on a bright picture, a dark one and one in flat light. A preset that looks perfect on the sample images can fall apart in your light.
Look for exposure variants, because film looks different over- and underexposed. And stay with one look for a month. You'll learn more from that than from ten different looks.
One more thing
I've said it before: nobody needs presets. The tools aren't the problem, we are, and I still think that. If you want one anyway, treat it as a suggestion, a visual concept you can try on your own work. The rest is your light and your subject.