Playing Around With Film Simulation Recipes

Learning more about film simulation recipes through experimentation

I’ve been playing around with film simulation recipes on my Fujifilm X-T4 with mixed success. One of the big lessons I learned while in the Galápagos Islands was that you really need to take time to test out new recipes and put care into choosing the right recipe for a given situation.

So when the time came to prepare for spending the month of March in Tucson, Arizona, I took the opportunity to look for a few new recipes that I could experiment with in the desert. One in particular that caught my eye was for Ektachrome E100VS (v2) by Ritchie Roesch over at Fuji X Weekly. I just loved how saturated the colors looked, and it helped that some of the sample photos were also taken in the desert!

I shot with this recipe almost exclusively the whole time I was in Arizona, and I was really pleased with how my photos turned out. Earth and skin tones come out beautifully warm. The desert foliage and blue skies have an amazing richness. I generally underexposed by a third of a stop as Ritchie suggested, which seems like a minuscule adjustment but kicks everything up a notch.

My (slightly modified) Ektachrome E100VS v2 Recipe

Here’s the recipe as I used it. I made two minor adjustments. (Original values for modified attributes are given in the third column.)

Attribute My Value Original Value
Film Simulation Velvia/VIVID
Grain Effect Weak, Small
Color Chrome Effect Strong
Color Chrome FX Blue Strong
White Balance 5150K, +3 Red, -3 Blue
Dynamic Range DR200
Tone Curve H+1.5, S+0.5
Color +1
Sharpness 0 –1
High ISO NR 0 –4
Clarity +3

Usage Notes: