After hundreds of hours of research, calibration & testing, I’m thrilled to share my free pack of Lightroom presets, the NATE CAM Starter Pack. This pack is a free download and gives you both Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw files for 10 different Lightroom presets inspired by the same film aesthetic as VSCO Cam.

What is VSCO Cam? VSCO Cam is a popular mobile photography app available for iPhone and Android. If you don’t already use it, I would encourage you try it out and purchase some of their outstanding preset packs (NOTE: I’m not affiliated with VSCO in any way - just a fan). Mobile photographers like VSCO Cam in large part due to the beautiful presets it offers. Their filters feel more professional and more refined than the filters in Instagram (which are just awful, honestly). So when you see people on Instagram tagging their posts with #VSCO, this means they used the VSCO Cam app to process their photo.

Of course, it would be impossible to create an exact replication of VSCO cam filters in Lightroom. Why? Well, for a numbers of reasons, including the proprietary, self-contained nature of the VSCO Cam app and the nature of raw conversion inside of Lightroom. So if you want VSCO Cam filters, you can only get those from VSCO.

As of now, though, VSCO does not produce VSCO Cam mobile apps equivalent filters for Lightroom. So if you shoot RAW using a DSLR, like me, you have to convert the raw file to jpeg, load it into your mobile device, and then apply. This workflow is cumbersome, and can produce a ton of image degradation along the way (vs. an “All RAW” workflow).

The NATE Cam Starter Pack lets you have an all RAW workflow and achieve a beautiful, stylish film aesthetic. These filters are my own, original works, built from scratch inside Lightroom. They are not endorsed by or affiliated with VSCO. They simply combine my expertise in Lightroom with everything I love about emulating film aesthetics inside Lightroom.

With that said, let’s get to the free download!

What's Inside This Pack

Inside this pack are 10 original presets. For each preset, there’s a version for Lightroom and a version for Adobe Camera Raw, along with instructions, in a ZIP file. Here’s what’s inside:

SP-01 – Warm & Muted (compare with A4)

SP-02 – Clean & Blue (compare with A5)

SP-03 –Clean & Green (compare with A6)

SP-04 - Clean Pastels (compare with HB1)

- SP-05 – Gritty Pastels (compare with HB2)

SP-06 – Warm and Moody (compare with M5)

SP-07 – Cold and Faded (compare with T1)

SP-08 – Classic B&W (compare with B1)

SP-09 – Rich B&W (compare with B5)

SP-10 – Faded B&W (compare with X1)

Here are some examples of how I've used this preset pack with my own photos, along with a short description of how each preset impacts photos: