Smooth Saturation Roll-off [Lightroom Preset]

What is Saturation roll off?

In film photography, color saturation reacts to light in a very natural way. And usually, bright areas of the photos don't get too saturated. Nothing clips harshly, nothing screams for attention while getting oversaturated. It just feels right. This happens because color intensity on film is naturally limited by light itself, and highlights tend to appear as pastel colors after the dyes reach their absorption limit. Also on film, in the shadows, there isn't enough light to fully activate the color dyes in the film stock, causing dark areas to lose saturation and drift toward more neutral tones.

Digital doesn’t behave like that. Our sensors will happily produce loud, oversaturated colors in areas where film would naturally tone them down. Highlights stay punchy when they should feel airy. Shadows cling to color when they should feel calm. The result is that familiar “digital look” — saturated, brittle, and a little too perfect.

But we can fix that with my new Lightroom preset. The Smooth Saturation Roll-off presets aim to restore that classic film charm with pastel highlights and muted shadows. 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. It achives this using 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.

EXAMPLES

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

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.

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