A Fresh Take on Kodak Film Emulation for Lightroom

Introduction

What is it that draws photographers to film, despite its somewhat outdated nature? I've written at length on this blog about the tactile, emotional, and aesthetic qualities of analog photography — and I still believe that digital can rarely replace the joy of loading a roll, advancing the film lever, hearing the satisfying shutter sound, and embracing the beautiful uncertainty of results.

Still, digital photography is often more practical. That’s why so many film photographers — myself included — look for tools to emulate the feel of analog film in a digital workflow. Over the years, a number of companies have emerged in this space: Mastin Labs, RNI, The Classic Presets, Dehancer — and now, a new contender: ColorPrecision, developed by film enthusiast and colorist Owen Markham.

When Owen reached out to introduce his Lightroom preset and profile suite, I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical. There are already several strong options on the market. But after an insightful and refreshingly honest conversation about his meticulous process — and after trying the set for myself — I was genuinely impressed. Let’s dive into what makes ColorPrecision such a compelling addition to the film emulation space.

The Kodak Ektar Noritsu Preset has become my go to simulation for travel photography. I love the versatility and the amazing colors. Much like shooting real Ektar.

Product Overview

ColorPrecision focuses exclusively on modern Kodak color film stocks that are still available today. This includes:

Portra 160, Portra 400, Portra 800
Ektar 100
Gold 200, Ultramax 400, ColorPlus 200
Ektachrome E100 (including a cross-processed variant)

What sets this package apart is not only the variety of stocks but the depth of emulation. Each film type comes in two scan variants — Fuji Frontier and Noritsu — capturing the distinct characteristics each scanner brings to the film. This kind of nuance is rare and incredibly valuable for photographers who are familiar with the subtleties of real-world lab work.

Included in the package:

96 Lightroom profiles
28 Lightroom presets
2 Photoshop actions for simulating film halation

You’ll also find emulations for pushed film and over/underexposure variations ranging from -2 to +2 EV, adding an extra layer of realism and creative flexibility.

Noritsu Scanner Profiles

Fuji Frontier Scanner Profiles

Workflow and Emulation Method

Kodak E100 slidefilm +0EV Noritsu

ColorPrecision uses a hybrid approach: Lightroom profiles, presets, and Photoshop actions. The core of the emulation lies in the profiles — essentially LUTs, similar to those used in film color grading — that are camera-specific and sit beneath your standard raw adjustments.

You’ll find the profiles under Lightroom’s Profile Browser, and while that adds a small extra step, it also opens the door to a much more flexible editing process. Because the profiles don't interfere with your sliders, you retain full control over exposure, white balance, contrast, and everything else Lightroom offers.

From there, the included presets layer on additional effects: grain, contrast, expired film look, halation, blur, and more. There’s even an AI masking tool to improve highlight handling when applying grain — especially useful, given how Adobe’s grain engine sometimes misbehaves in bright areas.

If you want to push things further, you can move into Photoshop and apply Owen’s halation effect, either as a global layer or selectively with a paintbrush — a creative tool that’s rare to find at this level of polish.

What Makes It Special?

Kodak Gold pushed +0EV Noritsu

The most important quality of any film emulation is simple: believability. Not just technical accuracy — although that matters — but a result that feels analog. Too often, even the most sophisticated film simulations fall apart under close inspection: unnatural skin tones, overdone contrast, weird digital artifacts, or an overall look that feels more like an Instagram filter than real film.

ColorPrecision avoids all of that. The colors are natural, the tones are beautifully rendered, and the skin tones — often a weak point in other tools — look excellent across multiple lighting situations. There are no harsh color shifts, no overbaked effects. The profiles just work, and they work across a wide variety of cameras, including Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fuji, Lumix, Leica, and Ricoh.

There’s also a Film Comparison Tool on the ColorPrecision website that lets you compare each profile with real scanned film images. It’s one of the most convincing A/B tools I’ve seen. It reinforces what I felt while editing: this isn’t a filter. It’s a crafted simulation, built by someone who understands both analog photography and digital color science.

Variants, Grain, and Exposure Latitude

One standout feature is the inclusion of Frontier and Noritsu variants for each film stock. Anyone who has worked with lab scans knows how different these machines can render the same roll of film — Frontier being more contrasty and saturated, Noritsu offering more subtle, neutral tones. Being able to switch between these looks in Lightroom is a serious benefit.

On top of that, the exposure variants simulate how each stock behaves when over- or underexposed — a creative possibility that’s often overlooked. These don’t adjust the exposure itself, so you’ll still use the Exposure slider in Lightroom, but the color rendering and contrast response changes, just as it would with real film.

And then there’s the grain. Grain simulation is notoriously hard to get right — Adobe’s implementation is often a weak spot — but here, it feels like Owen cracked the code. Something magical happens when applying the grain from this set: it ties everything together and elevates the digital file into something that genuinely resembles a scanned negative. It’s subtle, organic, and — for once — doesn’t ruin the highlights.

Colorplus +0EV Noritsu

Interview with Owen

Hello Owen, thanks a lot for answering some questions regarding your new product the colorprecision film emulation Lightroom and Capture One presets. But before we dive into this new product, please tell me a bit about you, what you do and why you created this new film presets?

Professionally, I am a cinematographer and colorist in Los Angeles, working on a variety of things like short films, documentaries, commercials, and music videos. I've always been into lighting and composition, but my interest specifically in film photography began in 2023. During that year, I was working at a film lab in New Zealand for about 6 months. There I learned about the other side of film photography – developing, processing, scanning and printing. I learned how to mix chemicals, run a C-41 developing machine, operate different film scanners, and see how each step in the process contributed to the final result. While working there I probably developed and scanned hundreds of different rolls. I feel like the repetition made me very aware of the characteristics of different film stocks and how they react to different variables like lighting, development times, and different scanners. Although the more I learned, the more I had questions I had. (How far can you over/under expose this stock? How does this stock look scanned on this scanner? How does changing the scan resolutions effect the image? How does pushing stocks change them. How are Kodak Gold and Colorplus different? How about Portra 400 vs 800?) I would look these questions up online, and while there were some answers, there wasn't a place that had all the answers. That's when I first had my idea to do a huge film test to answer the questions myself.

After working at the lab, I moved back to Los Angeles to continue doing cinematography and color grading work. The film emulation "look" for video was super popular, but I feel like there are only a few really good products for that. Since I had the experience working at a film lab, it made me wonder if there were any film emulation products for photography. I don't do much photo editing, so I wasn't really aware of how big the Lightroom preset industry was. And I actually like shooting on film more than digital because it usually comes out of the scanner looking good, no need for lightroom edits. I was curious about all the Lightroom film emulation preset sellers I discovered, but when I looked into them more, I was a bit disappointed by what they showed. None of the popular film emulations had examples of real film vs their profile. Also no one showed how they went about making the presets. With the color grading knowledge I had combined with my experience at a film lab, I was confident I could make something better. I realized that working on these emulations gave me the perfect excuse to finally do the big film test I’d always been thinking about.

What makes your set so special and what sets it apart from other companies doing these kind of film emulation presets?

One thing that separates Color Precision apart is that they are profile based, not presets. If you're familiar with video, a Lightroom profile is basically a LUT for Lightroom. The benefit of using profiles is that they can store much more precise color transforms. I was used to color grading in Davinci Resolve, and when you move from that to the basic Lightroom interface, it feels pretty limiting. My first idea was to build a film emulation in Resolve then export that into Lightroom. I realized Davinci does not support ProPhoto RGB, so then I came up with a method to build these emulations with a combination of 3DLUT creator, Lattice, and Lightroom. And to make all the camera compatible with one another, I created a unigue camera match LUT that is built into each specific camera profile. This ensures the emulations will be consistent no matter which digital camera you use. It was a lot of trial and error to find a workflow that lead me to create professional grade emulations

Kodak Porta 800 +1EV Frontier

You told me in our conversation before this quick interview that you put a ton of research into this project and that you are willing to share all the insights you have gathered about film photography over time on your website. Can you tell me more about this plans and what kind of content this will be?

There are other companies that use profile-based emulations, but none of them explain their method as clearly. I don't want my emulations to feel like a magic trick, where you are amazed by the result but how it happens is a secret to you. There shouldn't be a secret about emulations, its just translating the look of film into a digital image using software. Also, if you just use emulations without knowing how they are made, I think that discourages learning. I want people to be encouraged to try their own film experiments after using and seeing how Color Precision Emulations were made.

In the future I would like to add more articles to the recourses section. One thing I want to a make is a detailed breakdown on how I made these emulations. The main reason is to show people what they are buying. I'm not really worried about someone trying to copy it. I would actually be impressed if they decided to try. I would say I've put hundreds of hours of work into this product, and I think of selling these emulations as selling the time I put into developing and making these, and not a secret that you have no idea how works.

Another thing I want to write about is how much you can overexpose film. In the film test I did I shot each roll of from -3 stops to 4 stops over exposed. Its pretty crazy to see how much you can over expose film before clipping details. Would be interesting to write about, and compare how different stocks handle the light differently.

Also I'd encourage people to write in with questions they have, then I could try to solve them and maybe write an article about the process.

Do you have plans to expand the lineup of your film emulation stocks in the future?

The next emulation set I would like to work on is for Fujifilm. The tricky thing with this is that they have discontinued most of their popular film stocks, like Pro H or Superia. The only way to get those now is through a reseller, so I've been gradually sourcing discontinued Fujifilm in preparation for the next test shoot. I'd also like to do a CineStill and Ilford text shoot, as well as expand the Kodak emulations set with their black and white emulations.

Handling and Workflow

Yes, there’s a small learning curve — profiles must be selected manually from the profile panel, which is slightly buried in Lightroom’s UI. But after a few runs, it becomes second nature. You can also create custom starting points based on your favorite film and scanner combo and save them as your own presets for faster workflow. Once that’s done, it’s just a couple of clicks to apply a full, believable film emulation.

The profiles are lightweight, stable, and versatile — great for both one-off artistic edits and batch processing. And because they leave Lightroom’s tools untouched, you’re never locked into a “look” you can’t tweak.

How It Compares to Other Film Emulation Tools

If you're familiar with other film emulation systems, you might wonder how ColorPrecision stacks up. I’ve used many of them over the years, and each has its own strengths — but also its limitations. Here’s a quick look at how ColorPrecision compares to some of the more established players in this space.

Dehancer

Unlike ColorPrecision, Dehancer is a standalone application or plugin, not directly integrated into Lightroom. That architecture allows Dehancer to go further in some areas: it includes features like bloom simulation, film breath, and arguably more convincing grain rendering, especially when working with highlights and shadows.

But this added complexity comes with a trade-off. The Dehancer workflow is far less streamlined, especially when it comes to batch editing or staying within a native raw workflow. In contrast, ColorPrecision’s integration with Lightroom keeps things simple, fast, and flexible — especially if you're working with large sets of images.

There’s also a philosophical difference: Dehancer builds its profiles with an eye toward photographic prints (RA4 paper), while ColorPrecision’s profiles are calibrated against scanned film from Noritsu and Frontier machines. Both approaches are valid, but they reflect slightly different goals — one aiming to recreate the darkroom print, the other mimicking the lab scan we’ve all come to love.

RNI (Really Nice Images)

RNI uses a similar profile-based approach and offers a much wider range of film stocks, including some rare and discontinued options. It’s a more expansive library overall, and RNI also brings a certain artistic flair to its profiles. They feel expressive, stylized — sometimes even nostalgic.

ColorPrecision, on the other hand, feels more precise and restrained. The focus here is on authenticity, not mood or sentimentality. That’s not to say one is better than the other — it depends entirely on your intent. If you're chasing a poetic interpretation of film, RNI may resonate. But if you want a direct and believable match to actual film scans, ColorPrecision feels more accurate and reliable.

Mastin Labs

Mastin Labs is perhaps the closest in spirit to ColorPrecision. Both rely on real film scans and are deeply rooted in scanner-based workflows, particularly the Fuji Frontier aesthetic. But Mastin’s packs tend to be more limited in scope, with fewer film stocks per bundle and no exposure variation options.

Another important difference lies in the editing flexibility. Mastin Labs does not use custom Lightroom profiles, which means the applied look alters your Lightroom sliders directly. This makes it harder to fine-tune your edit afterward, since key sliders like contrast, white balance, or tone curve are already affected. In contrast, ColorPrecision applies its look through profiles, leaving all sliders untouched — giving you full freedom to edit non-destructively after the fact.

ColorPrecision includes two scanner profiles per film stock (Noritsu and Frontier), plus -2 to +2 EV variants, offering more creative control right out of the box. Mastin is elegant and easy to use, but if you're looking for depth, latitude, and full slider control, ColorPrecision offers a more powerful solution — and considering the number of profiles included, it arguably delivers more value for the money.

Cons

No review would be complete without a few caveats:

Currently, only Kodak color film stocks are available. That makes sense given the realistic approach, but it limits variety for now.
The profile selection workflow is less intuitive for beginners than one-click presets.
For best results in highlight recovery and grain masking, some manual Photoshop adjustments may be needed (though optional).

Final Verdict

ColorPrecision isn’t just another preset pack — it’s a carefully designed, technically sophisticated, and artistically satisfying film emulation toolkit. It avoids the pitfalls of many other offerings by focusing on believability, accuracy, and creative flexibility.

The inclusion of real-world scan variants, over/underexposure profiles, and subtly effective tools like halation and film blur make this package stand out. At $84, it offers strong value for serious photographers who want to bridge the gap between digital convenience and analog soul.

If you’re looking for a film look that feels natural, customizable, and genuinely photographic — ColorPrecision is absolutely worth your attention.