OWH Chrome and OWH Street Fujifilm recipes

Everybody loves Classic Chrome for street photography it seems. I’m here to give you what you want, but also to tell you that there’s a better way.

Oslo Barcode District. Øyvind Nordhagen with OWH Chrome

If you have been following me for some time you will know that Astia is my go to film simulation. I just think it has the most film-like contrast response and beautiful tonal gradients. I still think that, but people have been asking me to have a go at making a recipe for street photography based on Classic Chrome and I finally decided to do just that.

The lure of Classic Chrome

I have experimented with Classic Chrome pretty much since I got into Fujifilm. You can’t avoid it really. It’s all the rage in the community. People part with thousands of dollars to upgrade their cameras bodies just to have access to this film simulation.

These are the the benefits of Classic Chrome and these remain the same for me regardless of the subject:

• It is excellent at compressing highlights and harsh daylight.
• Dark yellows and oranges are substantially held back in certain ranges, letting other colors pop than the street itself.

These are my biggest reasons for not putting Classic Chrome back on the box. What I’ve found is that I both like and dislike it for these reasons:

1. You get a pretty hard contrast curve.
2. You get a strong cyan hue in the blues.
3. If you like your images with very saturated colors you are out of luck.

These can be good things, but they are not versatile qualities. In addition to that there is the fact that Classic Chrome is pretty much the hallmark of a Fujifilm photographer these days. This means your photos look the same as everyone else’s.

The alternative

Maybe you disregarded Pro Neg Hi as a boring film simulation, but look again! In many ways it’s very similar to Classic chrome. It has less highlight compression so you get a little more mid tone. It has a more neutral palette, but still a chrome-ish look. The right colors still pop, but gone are the cyan skies.

Take a look at this image. It’s obviously the same as the one above, but it has been processed with OWH Street instead. Scroll back up and maybe you realize that you miss the cyan-tinted sky of Classic Chrome. If so, then OWH Chrome is the recipe for you and that’s fine. Me though, I get literally sick of it sometimes. That’s why I’m a OWH Street guy.

The recipes

I typically use these on bright, sunny days, so I designed them to be usable down to the lowest ISO settings. This means use of Dynamic Range is out of the question, so both have received a highlight -1 setting to somewhat compensate. In any case, you need to be careful not to over-expose any of these. Clipped highlights are ugly!

Both recipes are made to look almost identical with grain being the key difference. For OWH Chrome I added the minimum amount of grain because I think it suits this recipe best, given that CC’s color and contrast profile is made to look more analog. Grain also has the effect of dithering tonal graduations, which reduces banding with higher contrast. That’s how I will use it anyway, Feel free to skip it.

OWH Chrome recipe

Use hashtag #owh_chrome

Film simulation: Classic Chrome
Dynamic Range: 100
White balance: Auto
WB Offset: R+2 B-1
Color Chrome Effect: Strong
ColorChrome FX Blue: Off
Highlight: -1
Shadow: 0
Color: +2
Sharpness: -2
Noise Reduction: -3
Clarity: 0
Grain: Weak/Small
Exposure compensation: -0.3 all day long

OWH Street recipe

Use hashtag #owh_street

This recipe uses Color Chrome FX Blue to give some attention and vignetting effect to blue skies, similar to how CC’s darkened, cyan treatment works, but without the sickening cyan tint 😆

Film simulation: Pro Neg Hi
Dynamic Range: 100
White balance: Auto
WB Offset: R+2 B-1
Color Chrome Effect: Strong
ColorChrome FX Blue: Weak
Highlight: -1
Shadow: 0
Color: +2
Sharpness: -2
Noise Reduction: -3
Clarity: 0
Grain: Off
Exposure compensation: -0.3 all day long

Tag me!

I love it when people use my recipes and let me know about it. If you like, you can use the hashtags above or tag @oyvindwashere in your captions on Instagram (or both). As always, follow me on Instagram to see more of my work and more examples of these recipes in use.

Thanks for reading!

Some more examples

OWH Chrome is on the left, OWH Street on the right here. Look for blues if you need a way to tell them apart. The images are converted from raw using Fujifilm X-RAW Studio. A couple have also been through Lightroom for cropping and perspective correction only.