0:00 Hello everyone. I hope you're all well. Now, almost daily, either from friends, family, social media, the YouTube comment section, I get asked, "What film recipe are you using?" I use just two different film recipes. I will talk about those today and how I use them. To clarify something real quick, 95% of the images that I share here on YouTube are RAWs that I've edited in Capture One as I shoot both RAW and JPEG at the same time. I use those JPEGs for social media, sending photos to friends and family really quickly, and ultimately they are the inspiration for the RAWs that I will edit later on. I try to get my JPEGs straight out of camera as close
0:47 to the RAW edits that I'm expecting to do. The RAW images that have been edited are then used for my website, for here on YouTube, or for prints and that sort of thing. Editing photos is a fun time for me and I do like having a bit of extra control sometimes over how they turn out. That being said, if I didn't like editing RAW images, I'd be more than happy with the JPEGs themselves and I could definitely see a future version of me shooting [music] JPEG only. The JPEGs are very, very solid. What's important to note is that I shoot with the 1/8 Black Pro Mist filter on all of my lenses and on all of my cameras as I love how it softens the images, blooms the highlights, and reduces the overall super sharp modern camera look. Don't worry though, if you don't have a Black Pro Mist filter, you don't need one and these film sim recipes will look great without them all the same.
1:37 This Fujifilm X100VI is the camera that I do the vast majority of my shooting with nowadays. And so, these film sim recipes >> [music] >> have been developed using the film simulations on this camera. What that means is that some of the older cameras like the XT4 and the XT20 with older processors don't have some of the same film simulations as this X100VI. One of the recipes I'll show you today has a film simulation that is on this camera that isn't on some of the others. But if you stick around, I'll show you how you can adapt that recipe to suit older cameras. Better yet, let me know down below if you'd like to see a separate video for the Fuji recipes that I tend to use on my XT4 or on Val's XT20, or on my XT32 in the past. More than happy to do that, just let me know down below. My film sim recipe philosophy is really,
2:22 really simple. I have one black and white film sim recipe and I've got one color film recipe. That's it. As I said earlier, simplicity is key. And for me, having one do-it-all color recipe is exactly what I want. Ronan's Neg is a warm, saturated, grainy, relatively contrasty film sim recipe based off the Nostalgic Negative film simulation. And I'm a massive fan of it. I use an auto white balance with a color shift of plus two red and minus five
3:08 blue and I find it works well in most situations. Particularly well in daylight, golden hour, just well-lit occasions is when I tend to shoot the most and that's when I find this works best, but it works generally okay in most scenarios. Nostalgic Neg as a film sim can lean fairly warm in the shadows, so if you're doing night time photography, you may notice that and that's when sometimes I think this film sim may not be the [music] best suited. I don't do a huge amount of night time photography and if you do, this may not be the best color sim for you, but just be aware, can lean quite warm in the shadows, which is something I like. You may have to then adjust the white balance to not be an auto white balance, to be a temperature with night time photography, but for most part it works pretty well. I find Nostalgic Neg tends to be a bit of a flat film sim, so I've added a bit of contrast to the shadows
3:53 as I tend to find to do that in post when editing the RAWs. I shoot in aperture priority as well and I ride the exposure compensation dial, so don't be afraid to either under expose to increase the saturation or over expose the highlights to bring some more details to the shadows. It's a pretty versatile sim, it's got a quite a decent range and that's what I tend to do with it. Nostalgic Negative is a film sim that is not available on all Fujifilm cameras. Anywhere from the X100VI, XT5 upwards, the sort of X-Trans 5 processor, I think it is. So, if you've an older camera, it's kind of like from an XT4 downwards, you might not have Nostalgic Negative. What you can do instead though is use both Classic Chrome or even Astia as an alternative and that tends to work quite
4:39 well. Classic Chrome was my go-to for years before I got a camera with Nostalgic Negative, so feel free to give that a shot. It's a firm fan favorite amongst the Fuji community as well. >> [music] >> Top tip for this as well as for any other color sim is using the Kelvin white balance alongside your color shift. Different Kelvin temperatures will give you vastly different results and if you want a more golden hour feel or a much cooler look and the camera isn't giving you what you want, it's a very powerful tool to get your images closer to where you want it to be. Sometimes your camera doesn't get the white balance right, so yeah, the Kelvin temperature tool is very, very handy. >> [music]
5:26 >> I'm sure Ronan's Acros started off as an HP5 sim or a Tri-X sim that I found on Fuji X Weekly roughly four or five years ago. It's kind of morphed into this film recipe that I've got now. This film sim is a very simple, grainy, relatively contrasty black and white sim with a sort of warm tint to it as well. I tend not to enjoy the sort of cold, blue, really clinical, sharp-looking black and white film sims or maybe like the standard Leica look, I guess, from what I've seen. It's not really what I enjoy, so I've pushed this to more of a warmer tone, really. I've pushed it anywhere kind of more orangey, red towards sepia, or also a bit more green, but still kind of away from the blue side of things. I think it just adds a bit of interest to these black and white images. Through the years, I've moved that color shift, even recently I thought I had it much more orange and turned out whatever
6:12 scene I was shooting on, it was a bit more of a green tint. Feel free to play around with it, but the basics of this are a very versatile black and white film recipe. I've also deliberately not made this an incredibly contrasty film sim, leaving it open to interpretation and also just if you want to send it to yourself and add a bit of extra contrast later, you can. If you want to do it in camera, great, feel free to manipulate the highlights and shadows a bit more as you see fit. These JPEGs are actually incredibly editable in post or just on your phone as I tend to do if I want a bit more extra contrast in there. Don't be afraid to. But yeah, it's very versatile and leaves a bit more to yourself later on if you needed to. Black and white is very much my get-out-of-jail-free card for when I don't enjoy the colors, my color recipe isn't giving me what I want, I'm just finding everything a bit uninspiring, but in particular, if I can't get the
6:58 skin tones right, black and white is always a nice fallback to be able to just remove the sort of weird color elements sometimes that you might have whether shooting indoors or in weird lighting and you just can't get it right with a color recipe. It's also a very classic look and everyone should really have a black and white film sim up their sleeve. Acros is a film sim that I'm fairly sure is on all Fujifilm cameras, young or old, so you should be able to adapt this slightly to whatever Fujifilm camera you have. I'll be honest, I've never used a monochrome film sim, not because it's bad, but because anytime I've used Acros, it's been really easy to get good results very quickly. Let me know if you have a monochrome film recipe down below, I'd love to try one. But yeah, Acros is a very solid base for a film recipe.
7:44 Another thing to play around with when shooting with the black and white film sims on Acros is the simulated red, green, and yellow filters. Feel free to give them a go in scenes where there's one color dominating the entire scene to add a bit of extra interest. So, if you've got a blue sky, mess around with some of the different filters, or it's a scene that's just dominated with one particular color in the background or the foreground or your subject, it can sometimes add contrast, reduce the contrast, or just change the overall mood of an image. I'd love to say I know what they do scientifically and the sort of physics behind it, but I don't. I leave mine on the plus Y E yellow filter cuz I find that works the most often for me. Have a go. Have a play around. They're quite fun to use. As I said earlier, everyone should have a black and white option on their camera. Ronan's Acros should serve you pretty well.
8:41 Well, there we are, folks. One color and one black and white film sim recipe that I use every day. I'm fully aware that they're not the best recipes out there and they may not suit everyone, but they're really decent starting place and they are genuinely the only two that I use for all of my photography, that inspire my RAWs, and are a massive part of my creative process. If you do go out and take some photos and use this recipe, I'd really love to see the results. Feel free to comment down below whether you've tried them out, share them on social media, feel free to tag me in anything, my socials are linked down below, or even send them to me on social media. I'd love to see them. >> [music] >> Be really cool and I hope you do find them inspiring. Like I said earlier, if you do want me to make a video about the recipes I've used on older cameras, please comment down below and let me know. I'm also in the process of making a video of some recent photography that I've done at the moment. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a video and
9:27 show you the JPEG that I took at the time versus the finished RAW image. What we'll What we'll both be able to see then is whether I'm telling the truth, whether my JPEGs actually do inspire my RAWs, how close they get, and I might either inspire you to use the JPEG recipe or we might even look at doing a video on how I edit my RAW images as I've had a few requests for that as well. If you don't want to miss that, make sure you subscribe down below and that'll be coming in the near future, hopefully. No promises though, life is busy. If you're still in this video and you're still not inspired by these particular recipes, but still searching for your own, there is loads of resources out there in the Fuji community. Two of my favorite examples of that are the Fuji X Weekly website and apps. [music] They do some incredible work over there making film sims for the entire community on someone like Reggie Ballesteros here on YouTube. He does great work in terms of Fuji
10:14 recipes that work in every condition. Really great stuff. Both do incredible work for the Fuji and wider photo communities. They definitely know more about this sort of thing than I do. I'll leave some links down below in the description to their work. Go check them out. Thanks again as always folks for taking the time out of your day to spend with me here on YouTube. It's really appreciated. Feel free to like, subscribe, and share the channel. Really appreciate any and all support. Thanks again and I'll see you in the next one. Have a lovely day. What?
