Faded Gold

The fade is built in the Whites and Blacks

Most film looks fake the fade with a tone-curve kink. This one does it with the endpoint sliders: whites pulled down to −37 and blacks lifted to +9 compress the histogram from both ends, so nothing in the frame is truly white or truly black. Highlights at −25 and shadows at +33 flatten the midrange further. That’s the matte, printed-paper base the rest of the edit sits on.

Golden shadows are the signature

Split toning puts hue 51 (gold) at 17% saturation into the shadows — the single move that gives the photo its aged warmth. Combined with a warm white balance (6401K, +18 tint), the shadow side of every building picks up that late-sun glow even where the light never reached.

Blues almost disappear

The sky keeps its place through luminance, not saturation: blue saturation drops to −87 while blue luminance rises +28, leaving a pale, paper-white sky instead of a postcard-blue one. Greens (−65) and yellows (−60) follow, so the sunlit brick and haze carry the remaining color.

Grain like real stock

At amount 40, size 50, roughness 50, the grain is coarser than a digital-cleanup pass would ever allow — deliberately. Large, rough grain over a compressed tonal range is what makes the image read as scanned film rather than a filtered JPEG.

Where this preset works

Golden-hour cityscapes, rooftops, travel photos with haze and distance. It expects warm light somewhere in the frame; on overcast scenes the gold shadows can drift toward green, so watch the tint slider.