measured — not guessed.
Here's the technical reason why.
Presets adjust Lightroom sliders — exposure, HSL, tone curves. But Lightroom only gives you 8 HSL sliders to work with. That's not enough control to recreate how a film stock actually responds to light across thousands of color and tonal combinations.
Profiles work differently. Built with 3D LUT technology, they map thousands of individual color data points to bake in the color and tonal output of the desired film stock right into your image in Lightroom. No slider tweaking. No approximation. The full character of the film — highlight rolloff, color crossover, shadow tone — applied in one click.
Version 1 proved the mechanism — LUT-powered profiles that bake in the color and tonal behavior of real film. Version 2 rebuilds the entire calibration system from the ground up. The result is the most accurate and comprehensive film emulation system ever created for Lightroom.
From the most popular color negatives to rare cinema stocks. Each profiled from real 35mm and motion picture film, scanned on professional lab equipment, calibrated with the 140-patch Digital SG target.
| V1 | V2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Calibration target | 24-patch ColorChecker | 140-patch Digital SG |
| Skin tone patches | 0 dedicated | 14 dedicated |
| Exposure levels | Single (0 EV) | Up to 7 (-3 to +3 EV) |
| Scanner versions | Frontier only | Frontier + Noritsu |
| Film stocks | 6 stocks | 20+ stocks |
new color science standard.