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Modern Negative Fujifilm Recipe
Film and digital — the best of both worlds in one recipe
Back in May this year I told you about a recipe I created named New American Color. I made it to mimic the look of Joel Sternfeld’s large format street portraits. To that end I would say i was fairly successful. As close as digital gets without post-processing anyway. A lot of other photographers seemed to enjoy it as well.
Using this recipe over the summer I have tried adjusting it a little and sometimes I would keep those adjustments in a separate custom bank and use that more than the original. Now, the original is probably more accurate to my original intention than what I’m presenting here. However I found that New American Color leans a little heavy towards a stylized look that only works for certain subjects and lighting conditions. I wanted to take what I loved about the first recipe and make something a little more versatile.
Those who follow me on Instagram will have noticed the name “New American Color MKll recipe" being used for some of my shots. This was the working title for Modern Negative. What it became however, is something inspired by certain attributes of New American Color, not a replacement for it. They serve different purposes so they deserve different names.
So what did I like about the first one?
New American Color was made to look like negative film of a format larger than 35mm. That is partly my intention here as well. Actually I wrote an entire article about achieving a medium format look on APS-C. There are some tips in there that go really well with this recipe. I want something that looks like it could have been shot on film, but modern film with modern processing. Slightly organic, but without a retro feel.
I still think Astia, which ironically is a slide film, is the best starting point negative film recipe. This simulation has a depth to the blues and the greens that none of the other film simulations have. It also has a bit of the, shall we say, unpredictability of film. With simulations like Classic Chrome or Classic Negative you can almost always tell that an image was shot with it. Not so with Astia. It will often exaggerate white balance shifts in shadows for instance. It’s also…
