pressedbunny
Offline
•
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 p.3 #6 · Favorite color film simulation | |
RoamingScott wrote:
I am FAR more buried into the recipe community than anyone else on FM. It's very rare that I say with carte blanche "trust me, I'm right", but I'm executing that privilege here  Though you are correct in your definitions here, I'm not sure bragging that you're "more buried into the recipe community than anyone else" is the slam-dunk you think it is, considering how toxic that crowd has been for many years and how much misinformation they spread in the name of putting themselves over and other people down.
As someone who actually writes original colour matrices from scratch, and loves the Japanese SOOC crowd and dipped in and out of their homebrew efforts going all the way back to about 2007 or so, I find the western 'recipe community' interesting to watch from afar, but keep a safe distance. If I were you I'd rather pretend I had nothing to do with 'em...
gaopa wrote:
I have never tried to create a recipe. Do you start with one of the Fuji film simulations and change it to suit you or do you start from scratch on your simulation?
Fuji recipes are no different from making something like a Lightroom preset; if anything they're a lot simpler, because there are many fewer options. It's just a matter of opening the menu and moving a control until it looks the way you like it. If you can press the 'Q' button on your camera, you've got all the tools.
Pick a film sim as your base look; consider what is already closest to the final result you want. (i.e. Don't pick Velvia if you want something low-saturation!) Now pick a white balance, or white balance tint/shift. Then turn the highlight tone, shadow tone, colour saturation, and clarity controls up/down to taste. Decide if you want to turn colour chrome and/or grain effects on or not. That's it, you're done; you've made a 'recipe'. The whole thing will probably take you under a minute if you know what look you want; maybe take three minutes if you're just trying random combinations until you land on something you like. There simply aren't enough options for it to take any longer than that.
There's a lot of fluff about how to nail the look of a particular film stock, making recipes seem more scientific to develop, but as I already mentioned in a previous post, the settings in Fuji are far too limited to actually do that, and if you compare the claimed results vs real film, you quickly see they rarely share even the most passing resemblance. Even when making actual colour matrices, which takes weeks of programming (sometimes months) and offers literally total freedom, it's still essentially impossible to actually replicate any given film because of how a sensor reacts to light vs film layers.
In-camera settings are fun and it's great that Fuji supply more options than most. (In fact by my reckoning, they offer the most strictly in-camera options of any manufacturer, though Canon has them beat if you count the ability to upload custom matrices to the camera from a desktop.) In-camera presets or recipes are great and everyone should mess with their settings at least a little bit, because if you can find a combination you like, being able to use those in-camera JPGs will save you a lot of time over relying on post-processing. Nobody should dismiss camera JPGs, and nobody should overlook the variety of styles you can get out of Fuji. Everyone should try every film sim, both with default settings and with alterations. But don't over-think it. The complexity and uniqueness of 'recipes' is horribly exaggerated, so don't be intimidated. Literally just open the Q menu and turn some things up or down. In the time it's taken you to read this, you could have made several...
|
