Smooth Saturation Roll-off [Lightroom Preset]

In film photography, color saturation is tied directly to exposure, so it naturally falls off at both ends of the tonal range.

Why roll off the saturation of your images?

As photographers, we will often find digital photos to look saturated in an unnatural way. So we might want to roll off saturation because in the real world, and on film photography, color intensity is naturally limited by light itself. On film, the shadows, there isn't enough light to fully activate the color dyes in the filmtock, causing dark areas to lose saturation and drift toward neutral. In highlights, the dyes reach their absorption limit, so bright areas gradually shed color and ease into white with a soft, pastel roll-off.

That's where my new Lightroom preset comes in, aiming to restore that classic film charm. The Saturation soft roll-off Lightroom presets are designed to be a powerful yet subtle tool that will help you recreate the way film stock captures colors and emulate that in your digital photography. In simpler terms, it tones down the saturation in the darkest and lightest parts of your images while leaving the mid-tones untouched. This is achieved with 3 masks that aim to stimulate that gradual roll-off on your digital files.

Above, you can see how this would look on a luma vs sat curve. The effect will be subtle, but by incorporating this technique into your workflow, you will level up your film emulations. The preset effectively softens the saturation at the extremities of the exposure spectrum. This intentional reduction in saturation results in a more subtle and organic tonal balance, minimizing any color casts while enhancing the overall natural appearance of your images.

EXAMPLE #1

Pay attention to highlights on the forehead and especially how the blue digital-looking cast behind the subject dissipates, leaving room for a more natural gradient

EXAMPLE #2

Again, we can see how the preset reduces the digital look of the image. It is especially noticeable that the highlights of the face are much cleaner and natural-looking.

EXAMPLE #3

The preset works best with natural light and shots with no color channels oversaturated at the time of capture. I would avoid using it on images where RGB LEDs were used as the main color source because they output a lot more color in only one of 3 channels and often will overexpose at least one of them.

You will get 3 presets.

• One of them affects both shadows and highlights
• One that will only target the highlights
• One that will only affect the deep shadows
  

INSTALLATION:

Copy the .xmp files to the specific folder:

Windows: C:Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings

macOS: User Library>Application Support>Adobe>CameraRaw> Settings

You can make as many subfolders and organize the files however you see fit as Lightroom won't care and it will load everything in them

WARNING: Your Lightroom Version has to be somewhat recent. This won't work with versions of Lightroom that do not have a curve panel inside their maks.

To learn how to add any presets to Lightroom you can follow these steps:

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/kb/faq-install-presets-profiles.html