Ever since the Classic Negative film simulation was released and I got my X-Pro3 I’ve been using it and trying hard to love it. I must say that my most used and loved film simulation, aside the black & white ones, has been Classic Chrome. Classic Negative is interesting in a way that it gives a very unique look to your pictures, quite a “vintage” one to them if that means anything.
My main gripe with Classic Negative, the thing I don’t really like, is what it does to the skin tones. There’s a kind of an orange tint to them that I found non natural. If you came to appreciate, as I did, Fuji colour science specially in the realm of delicate and accurate colour skin tones, you will agree with me. But as i said, Classic Negative otherwise does cool things with the colours and you can cook pretty interesting looks.
I’ve actually been enjoying the Fujicolor Superia 800 from Ritchie Roesch and using it on a regular basis. I wanted something on my own that I would also enjoy to use and that would be a little more on the “warmer side”. For this recipe I used a not so usual White Balance setting nominally one of the fluorescent settings that are pre-defined on the camera. I did so because it allows me to obtain different results depending of the light conditions of the moment, either if it’s sunny or more cloudy and even at night time. I also added some white balance colour shift so I could get to the tonalities I was looking for.
So this is what I came up with :
In camera settings
- Film Simulation: Classic Negative
- Exposure compensation : usually between 0 and + 0.6
- Grain effect: Off
- Monochromatic color: 0
- Iso settings: from iso 640 up
- Color Chrome Effect: Weak
- Color Chrome Effect Blue: Off
- White balance: Fluorescent light 2, , 1 Red -3 Blue
- Dynamic Range: DR100
- Color: +1
- Tone Curve: H: -1 , S: +0
- Sharpness: 0
- Noise reduction: -4
- Clarity: 0
Observations
- You may need to fiddle with the exposure compensation a little with other values than the ones i put as an example depending of the light conditions you personally encounter.
- I usually don’t like to add grain effect which I don’t find to be quite natural, I prefer to set Noise reduction to it’s maximum negative value, and to shoot with higher iso than really needed, specially in day light, sometimes even switching to Electronic Shutter when the light conditions are too bright.
I hope you will like it, leave me a comment if you find it useful
As always I’ll leave you with some example images made with the recipe.
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