My Fuji X70: Fujichrome Slide, Kodak Platinum 200 (XTrans2 recipes)

Above/featured: 1st Narrows, from John Lawson Pier.

My Fujifilm X70 mirrorless fixed-lens prime camera has been a big plus for photography at domestic and international locations. The built-into-camera film-simulations (e.g., Provia, Velvia) work beautifully in standard settings, but as I’ve never had a film camera, the advent of “camera recipes” to produce additional film-like settings stimulated interest in different colour or pictorial representations.

So far, I’ve tested these Fujifilm film-simulation (“film-sim”) recipes:

• Ektachrome 100SW (saturated warm), simulating images with the Kodak colour transparency or slide films produced 1996–2002;
• Kodachrome 64, simulating images with the Kodak colour film produced between the mid-1970s and 2009;
• Kodacolor, “producing classic Kodak analog aesthetic closest to early-1980s Kodacolor VR200 colour film that’s been overexposed.”

3 film-sim recipes in sunny summer September

On a sunny late-summer day, I skip across the waters of Burrard Inlet (Salish Sea) to West Vancouver for a photography test of three Fuji film-sim recipes: “Fujichrome Slide”, “Kodak Platinum 200”, and “Kodacolor”. These recipes are for the X-Trans II sensor as Ritchie Roesch describe in Fuji X Weekly. All other recipes sorted by specific Fujifilm camera sensor are found here.

My X70 camera settings are:

	Fujichrome Slide	Kodak Platinum 200	Kodacolor
*Built-in film-sim*	Standard (Provia)	Standard (Provia)	Classic Chrome
*Colour*	+2 (High)	+2 (High)	-2 (Low)
*Sharpness*	+1 (Medium-High)	+1 (Medium-High)	0 (Medium)
*Highlights tone*	-1 (Medium-Low)	+1 (Medium-High)	+1 (Medium-High)
*Shadows tone*	+2 (High)	-2 (Low)	+1 (Medium-High)
*White Balance*	Fluorescent 1	Sunlight	6300K
*WB R,B offset*	-4 Red, +7 Blue	0 Red, 0 Blue	-3 Red, -2 Blue
*Dynamic Range*	DR400
*ISO*	1000
*Noise Reduction*	-2 (Low)

With straight-out-of-the-camera JPGs, I reduced the image area by a factor of 6 from full-size to post-size. I made no adjustments to exposure level, rotation, geometric distortion, or spatial/lateral shift. The main differences I observed among these three recipes are:

Fujichrome Slide: pink-purple tinge;
Kodak Platinum 200: blues emphasized; and
Kodacolor: coppery-green tinge.

Depending on what you’re trying to convey or want the viewer to feel, I know I’ve got a place for all three of these recipes under bright natural light.