Recipes: Saving a Setup to a Button

In the Fujifilm community a “recipe” means one complete set of image settings: film simulation plus dynamic range, highlight and shadow tone, colour, clarity, grain and white balance shift.

Plenty of ready-made recipes exist online, the FujiXWeekly series being the best known. They are good starting points, but this chapter’s position needs stating first: a good recipe is not the one that looks best, it is the one that stops you thinking. Every parameter the last four chapters took apart is a decision point in the field. What a recipe does is bundle seven or eight of them into one turn of a dial, so your attention can go back to light and composition.

Copying rarely lands exactly

A recipe was built in someone else’s light, on their lens, on their subjects. Three things shift when it reaches you.

The light is different. An overcast day in northern Europe and midday in the subtropics differ in temperature, intensity and contrast. A recipe tuned for soft northern light will read as over-contrasted under a hard noon sun.

The sensor generation is different. As chapter 18 noted, X-Trans IV (X-E4) and X-Trans V (X-T5) do not render identically; the same numbers produce slightly different highlight roll-off and slightly different behaviour in the densest colours. Check which body a recipe was built on before copying it.

The lens is different. This one gets overlooked. Coatings and internal reflections affect micro-contrast and flare resistance: an older lens shooting into the light gives you greyer blacks, a modern one holds them down. The same shadow tone +2 lands differently on each.

What to change first

When a recipe does not sit right, do not rebuild it. In order of sensitivity to environment:

1. White balance shift — the most sensitive. It sits directly on top of the source’s colour temperature, so changing the source throws it off. Some recipes specify a temperature outright (“Kelvin 6300”); that was for one particular light, and must be reset elsewhere.
2. Shadow tone — next. It sets the picture’s force, and how much force you need follows the contrast in front of you. Overcast wants +1; harsh noon may want −1.
3. Colour — moderate. It depends on how saturated your subjects are; a flower market and a concrete city ask for different things.
4. The film simulation itself — should be last. If the simulation has to change, this is not an adjustment, it is a different recipe.
5. Clarity and grain — barely ever. They are style choices, not compensation for the environment.

Saving a custom set

Both bodies store seven custom sets, C1–C7.

Creating and editing IMAGE QUALITY SETTING → EDIT/SAVE CUSTOM SETTING → choose a slot → set each item → save.

Switching in the field Press Q on the shooting screen, or assign SELECT CUSTOM SETTING to a function button (SET UP → BUTTON/DIAL SETTING → FUNCTION (Fn) SETTING).

The white balance trap

This is the one thing in the chapter most worth remembering: the white balance preset does not switch with the custom set.

The symptom goes like this. You tune C3 indoors, including a white balance chosen for tungsten. The next day, outdoors, you switch to C3; the simulation and every parameter apply, but white balance stays wherever it was — and the colour is completely wrong. You will assume the recipe is broken.

The fix is to confirm the white balance option inside SELECT CUSTOM SETTING as well. Build the habit: after switching recipe, glance at white balance before the first frame. It costs a second and saves a whole shoot.

A practical suggestion

If your body allows custom sets to be named, name them by situation — “overcast”, “night market”, “portrait” — rather than by simulation (“Classic Chrome”). The reason is simple: the first thing you assess on location is the light, not the simulation. “Overcast” tells you immediately whether to turn the dial. “Classic Chrome” makes you work out what it suits all over again.

Allocating the seven

Most people fill all seven with pretty recipes and then, in the field, cannot remember which is which.

Allocating by lighting situation works better, because light is the first thing you read:

Slot	Situation	Suggested base
C1	Bright outdoors	Classic Chrome or Velvia
C2	Overcast / soft light	PROVIA or ASTIA, shadow +1
C3	Warm interiors	Nostalgic Neg. (X-T5) / Classic Neg. (X-E4)
C4	Night / artificial light	Classic Neg. or ETERNA
C5	Portraits	ASTIA, clarity −2
C6	Monochrome	ACROS+Ye, grain weak / small
C7	Contrast rescue	ETERNA, DR400

The field procedure becomes: read the light, turn to the matching slot, shoot. No thinking required.

If seven feels like too many to remember, start with three — bright, overcast, night. Those cover the large majority of ordinary shooting, and when you finally hit a situation none of them fits, you will know exactly what the fourth needs to be.

Four starting points

These are places to start, not correct answers — baselines built to be changed. All are quoted for the X-T5; X-E4 substitutions are noted.

One: everyday street (composed)

Film simulation   Classic Chrome
Dynamic range     DR200
Highlight tone    0
Shadow tone       +2
Colour            −1
Clarity           0
Grain             Off
White balance     Daylight, R −1 / B +1

Why each number. Shadow +2 gives the frame force; Classic Chrome’s shadows are already firm, and a little more produces that composed, printed-page quality. Colour −1 takes the edge off the reds Classic Chrome occasionally overstates. The shift towards blue cleans up the shadows and pairs naturally with what Classic Chrome does to yellows. Clarity at 0 is deliberate: street work means catching moments, and non-zero clarity slows the burst buffer (chapter 20).

DR200 is a compromise. Take it to DR400 on a bright day, back to DR100 under cloud.

Two: warm memory (dusk, interiors)

Film simulation   Nostalgic Neg. (X-E4: Classic Neg.)
Dynamic range     DR200
Highlight tone    −1
Shadow tone       0
Colour            0
Clarity           −1
Grain             Weak / small
White balance     Auto, R +1 / B −2

Why each number. Highlight −1 keeps the amber highlights off the ceiling — Nostalgic Neg. already pushes highlights towards amber, so that end is crowded to begin with. Clarity −1 because this set mostly gets used where there are people. Weak, small grain suits its backward-looking direction.

Substituting Classic Neg. on the X-E4, take shadow tone to −1: Classic Neg. has naturally heavier shadows, whereas Nostalgic Neg.’s are blue rather than dark.

This is the only set here that keeps white balance on auto. Dusk and interior light change too fast for a fixed temperature to hold, and the price — a reference that moves frame to frame — is why the shift is kept small.

Three: monochrome (ACROS)

Film simulation   ACROS + Ye filter
Dynamic range     DR200
Highlight tone    +1
Shadow tone       +1
Clarity           +1
Grain             Weak / small

Why each number. Raising both ends is deliberate: monochrome has no colour with which to separate a subject, so it needs a harder curve than a colour frame does. The yellow filter deepens the sky without overstating it (+R is stronger but turns skies unnatural quickly). Clarity +1 because so much of what makes a black-and-white photograph work is surface texture.

No colour value is given, because the parameter does nothing under ACROS.

Four: overcast rescue (low contrast)

Film simulation   PROVIA (or ASTIA)
Dynamic range     DR100
Highlight tone    +1
Shadow tone       +1
Colour            +1
Clarity           +1
Grain             Off
White balance     Shade, R 0 / B 0

Why each number. This set runs opposite to the other three. Grey weather gives you too little contrast and washed colour, so both tone ends go +1 to pull them apart, colour +1 lifts what has sunk, and clarity +1 restores some dimensionality to objects that have lost their shadows.

DR100 is the item people get wrong most often here: an overcast scene has no highlights at risk, so DR would only raise the ISO and flatten an already flat picture further (chapter 19).

White balance on Shade rather than Daylight, because overcast light is genuinely cooler in origin — it is scattered sky — and the daylight preset leaves the frame blue.

What a recipe has to specify

When you save a set, name every one of these explicitly rather than leaving it at whatever it was:

Must specify	Why
Film simulation	The direction of the whole set
Dynamic range	Sets the clipping point; tied to the scene
Highlight / shadow tone	Sets the force
Colour	Sets the density
Clarity	Affects texture and buffer speed together
Grain	Style
White balance and shift	Most sensitive, most often forgotten

Safe to ignore: sharpness (0 is usually right), noise reduction (likewise), and the Color Chrome pair, which only matter for particular subjects and cost little when idle.

What a recipe cannot hold

Some dissatisfactions cannot be fixed with a recipe, because the setting is not part of a custom set at all.

The important one is exposure compensation. On both bodies it is a physical dial on the top plate, and a dial’s position is the value — a custom set has no authority over it. So “my frames always come out too bright” cannot be solved by saving a recipe. It has to become a habit (turn the dial to −1/3 whenever you select that set), or you treat the dial as the eighth field of the recipe and write it in your own notes.

Focus mode, drive mode and metering mode are likewise not stored. Those belong to how you shoot; a custom set governs what the picture looks like. Keeping that line clear saves a lot of “but I definitely saved that”.

How to test whether a recipe is any good

The hard part of refining a recipe is that you cannot hold the light still. Between today’s frames and yesterday’s, some of the difference is the settings and some is the light, and you cannot separate them by looking.

In-camera RAW conversion can:

1. Pick a few RAW files shot in different light — one each from a bright day, an overcast day, an interior and a night scene.
2. Playback menu (▶) → RAW CONVERSION. Convert each once with the old recipe and once with the new.
3. Compare the two versions of the same frame side by side.

Now the scene, the light and the composition are identical, and the only variable really is the setting. The test a recipe has to pass is not “looks good in the scene it was built for” but “looks acceptable in all four” — because in the field you will not have time to retune for each kind of light.

For comparisons at volume, X RAW STUDIO connects the camera to a computer and lets you adjust on screen and batch convert, with the processing still executed by the camera, so results match in-camera exactly. It is the only route to identical results on a computer; third-party “Fuji look” presets are not.

Common failures and how to diagnose them

What you see: you switch to a recipe and the colour is nothing like what you saved. Usual cause: white balance did not switch with it (see the trap above). What to change: check white balance after switching, or confirm the white balance option inside SELECT CUSTOM SETTING.

What you see: a recipe copied online looks nothing like the sample images. Usual cause: different light, sensor generation or lens — and sample images were made under specific conditions. What to change: work down the sensitivity order above. White balance shift first, shadow tone second. Do not rebuild the set.

What you see: all seven slots are full and you spend the moment cycling through Q to find one. Usual cause: they were allocated by prettiness rather than by situation. What to change: reallocate by lighting situation, so that reading the light points straight at a slot number.

What you see: burst shooting stutters on candid work. Usual cause: that recipe has non-zero clarity or Color Chrome switched on. What to change: in whichever set you use for candids (usually C1 or C4), clarity to 0 and Color Chrome off.

What you see: your own recipe never feels finished and you keep tweaking it. Usual cause: you are chasing “best” rather than “good enough and stable”. What to change: accept it as imperfect and shoot two hundred frames before changing anything. A perpetually tweaked recipe is not a recipe, because it has saved you no decisions.

What you see: you want to change a recipe but cannot tell whether the change is an improvement. Usual cause: no fixed basis for comparison. What to change: use the RAW conversion method above. It is the only way to hold the light constant.

Why the film era had no word for this

Worth a moment, because it explains why recipe culture is specifically a digital phenomenon.

Film photographers certainly had the concept of a fixed set of choices. It was called the roll loaded in your camera. Choose Velvia and all thirty-six frames were Velvia. Changing meant finishing the roll or sacrificing what remained of it.

That constraint had a side effect: it forced people to stay put. Most photographers used one or two stocks for years and consequently knew them intimately — how that film behaved under cloud, into the light, a stop overexposed. The familiarity was manufactured by cost.

Digital reduced the cost of switching to zero. The upside is freedom; the downside is that nothing forces you to stay put any more. Recipe culture is, at bottom, an attempt to rebuild that constraint deliberately: lock a set of choices behind a number so that you stop re-deciding every frame.

Understanding that changes how you use them. The purpose is not to give you more options; it is to give you fewer. Seven sets is already close to the practical ceiling. If you find yourself wanting a fifteenth, that is usually a sign you are asking recipes to solve something that is not a recipe problem.

Where your own recipe comes from

From the thing you always want to change afterwards.

Always wish the shadows were heavier? Shadow tone +2 goes into the recipe. Always find the colour overdone? Colour −1. Always find the highlights too hard? Highlight tone −1.

Recipes are not designed. They grow out of a repeated dissatisfaction.

Concretely: shoot two hundred frames on one set, then pull out your ten favourites and your ten least favourite and look for what each group has in common. That commonality is your next adjustment. It beats tuning against a table of numbers online, because the evidence is your own photographs.

Be ready for the commonality to be something other than a setting. If those ten disappointments were all shot at midday, what needs changing is when you go out, not the recipe. If the subject is always too small in the frame, it is the lens or where you stood. Confirm the problem really is colour processing before adjusting a parameter — which is the same point these five chapters have made throughout: in-camera processing interprets the light that reached the sensor. It will not rescue a photograph for you.

This frame is waiting for your photograph