Leica colors are a myth –your Fujifilm can do it too

I have gotten a lot of questions about “the Leica look” on Fujifilm files ever since I started publishing Fujifilm recipes. Let’s explore that.

For me it’s not that Leica images are the gold standard necessarily. And people still rave about the Fujilfilm color science, whatever that means. But since I switched from Nikon to Fujifilm 5 years ago there’s one annoyance that I haven’t been able to figure out. Until now.

There was always this unexplainable flatness that I couldn’t put my finger on, especially in the shadows. I’ve heard from others that their experience is the same. I make no claims that this is a universal problem, but maybe your experience matches mine. In that case I might just have a solution for you.

I have always been an image quality conscious photographer. I’ve always been a fastidious post processor too. What I am looking for is hard to describe, but I would say it’s like the umami of color and contrast; I want my images to have meaty colors, but without being overly contrasty or saturated. I want my images to have detail and depth, but I don’t want them to be flat. With Fujifilm files I have always found this to be hard to achieve.