Photo Developer ships with 32 built-in presets. These packs sit on top — looks that go further in one particular direction than a built-in library should. They're free. Each one downloads as a set of .pdpreset files: plain, portable preset files you can inspect, share, or delete like anything else.
Two things are true of every pack here. First, a preset is a starting point, not a commitment — apply one and every panel it touched is yours to keep moving, and the export can say adapted along the edge if you wander off it. Second, none of them set exposure. The right exposure depends on your frame, not on a preset; get it where you want it first, then apply the look.
Installing a pack
You need Photo Developer 1.5.1 or later (Printing Bench needs 1.5.3). Unzip the download, open the Preset Manager (⌥⌘P), and drag the .pdpreset files onto the window — or click the import button (⤓) next to the search field and select them. Each pack files itself under its own category in the sidebar. Nothing else in your library is touched: your own presets, favourites, and keyboard shortcuts stay exactly as they were. To remove one, right-click it and choose Delete — they're ordinary presets, not an installation.
Every download includes the pack's README — the full study notes, per-preset, including where each look comes from and where it breaks.
Glorious Technicolor
Five looks, all in colour, all built for daylight — bright, saturated, hard-sun scenes. Each one is a study of a colour process and the cinematographer whose handling of it kept demanding another viewing: Three-Strip (Technicolor, Jack Cardiff — The Red Shoes), Widescreen (65mm Eastmancolor, Freddie Young — Lawrence of Arabia), Melodrama (Douglas Sirk and Russell Metty), Matinee (the Technicolor musical), and Continental. A daylight pack on purpose: built for bright, low-ISO files, and tuned on OM-1 RAWs. For dusk, night, and interiors, that's what Seven Studies is for — this is its sunlit opposite.
Download Glorious Technicolor · 5 presets · Photo Developer 1.5.1+
Seven Studies
Seven looks — three in colour, four in black and white — made as a thank-you to the Micro Four Thirds community at mu-43.com, whose feedback shaped a lot of what Photo Developer has become. Each is studied from a photographer whose handling of tone earns the word: Deadpan (Stephen Shore, early Eggleston), Chiaroscuro (Bill Henson), Sodium Fog (Todd Hido), Full Scale (Edward Weston), Platinum (Irving Penn), Vellum (Robert Mapplethorpe), and Surface. A few of them deliberately remove things — Deadpan clears colour grading, Surface clears any vignette. The absence is part of the look.
Download Seven Studies · 7 presets · Photo Developer 1.5.1+
Bad Chemistry
What happened to film after the shutter — in the tank, in the tray, in the wrong chemistry. Six process looks, every one built on the point curve, the one control in Photo Developer that can bend tone back on itself: Sabattier (solarisation — the master curve climbs, peaks, then falls), False Color (the aerial-infrared palette, one channel run in reverse), Reversal (cross-processing, with the shadows and highlights swinging to opposite hues), Lith, Prussian, and Silver Retention. Some of them are loud on purpose — if a look does something drastic, the drastic thing is the look. More than any other pack, judge these on your own files: a curve that carves one image can wreck the next, and that's the nature of the instrument.
Download Bad Chemistry · 6 presets · Photo Developer 1.5.1+
Printing Bench
Four looks built on masks — not a grade over the whole picture, but a treatment confined to one part of the tonal scale, the way a printer works under an enlarger: Split Grade, Contrast Mask, Highlight Texture, and Shadow Cleanup. They touch nothing except local adjustments, so they go on last, over the photo you've already developed.
One thing to know before you use them, in plain terms: applying one replaces any local adjustments already on the photo. The preset's masks don't merge with masks you've painted — they take over the list. Cmd+Z brings yours back, and nothing is written to disk until you save, but apply these before you've spent an hour on brushwork, not after. And since a luminosity mask selects whatever is that bright in your frame, check the band positions after applying: Show Mask in the Local panel, then move Min/Max until it covers what you meant.
Download Printing Bench · 4 presets · Photo Developer 1.5.3+
Spectral Response
Four black-and-white presets about the question every conversion answers before any other: when a colour becomes a grey, which grey does it become? Orthochromatic — red-blind, the way film was before 1906; skin goes dense, brick drops to charcoal, and it doesn't care how saturated the red is. Yellow Filter — the one photographers left on the lens and forgot about. Orange Filter — skies distinctly darker, haze cut back. Red Filter — the dramatic end of the bag of glass. The README in the download publishes the full recipes, so you can rebuild these in Lightroom, Capture One, darktable, or RawTherapee if you'd rather — the point is the spectral choice, not the app.
Download Spectral Response · 4 presets · Photo Developer 1.5.1+
The fine print
The packs are free for personal use with no account and no email gate — download, drag, develop. They're ordinary preset files: everything they do is visible in the panels after you apply one, which is rather the point. If a pack look ends up in a photograph you're proud of, that's the whole reward structure working as intended.