Tone and Texture, Adjusted

The film simulation sets the direction; the parameters in this chapter decide the detail. What they have in common is that each one moves only part of the picture, so knowing which part matters far more than memorising values.

In practice you work backwards. Ask what specifically disappoints you about this photograph, then find the parameter responsible for that. Flat bright areas are highlight tone. Limp shadows are shadow tone. Texture that lacks substance is clarity. A colour that has collapsed into a flat patch is Color Chrome. Going the other way — moving sliders and then looking — becomes trial and error, and it is remarkably easy to change two things that cancel each other out.

Highlight tone / shadow tone (−2 to +4)

The two most used and most often remembered backwards.

• Highlight tone + → bright areas brighter and harder, less highlight detail
• Highlight tone − → bright areas pulled back and softer, highlight detail recovered
• Shadow tone + → dark areas heavier and blacker, less shadow detail
• Shadow tone − → dark areas lifted and softer, shadow detail recovered

The mnemonic: every ”+” pushes outwards (more contrast), every ”−” pulls inwards (less).

They change the slope of a curve, not a brightness

These are frequently misread as “make the highlights brighter”. What they actually move is the slope of the tone curve over that section.

Picture the tone curve as a mapping running from black to white. Highlight tone +2 steepens its right-hand section: adjacent bright levels get pushed apart, so contrast in the highlights rises and the area reads as brighter and harder. The curve has not grown any longer, though, so the price of that spreading is more levels crowded together at the very top — which is exactly what losing highlight detail means.

Highlight tone −2 does the reverse: the right-hand section flattens, levels that were crowding the ceiling come back down, the highlights soften and the detail returns.

Two things follow that are worth holding onto:

1. This is not exposure compensation. Compensation moves the whole curve; highlight tone moves one end of it. A picture that is too bright overall wants compensation. A picture whose bright areas have gone flat wants highlight tone.
2. It is not the DR setting either. DR decides where the clipping point sits; highlight tone decides how the range below that point is distributed. Anything already clipped is not coming back, whatever you do here.

Combinations that work:

Wanted	Highlight	Shadow
Standard	0	0
Faded film look	−1	−2
More punch for street	0	+2
Rescuing a grey day	+1	+1
Backlit, protecting highlights	−2	0 or −1
Heavy low-key	+1	+3

Pull these two in the film simulation lab and you can watch each of them act on its own end and nowhere else.

Colour (−4 to +4)

Global saturation, stacked on top of whatever the simulation already does — so Velvia at +4 is outlandish, while PRO Neg. Std at +4 only reaches roughly where PROVIA starts.

The distinction from the previous chapter is worth restating here: a simulation decides which hues get pushed; the colour parameter pushes all of them together. So the first move towards a denser picture is always a different simulation, never this slider — this one takes skin tones and neutral surfaces along with it.

Useful values:

• −2 to −1 — Classic Neg. or Classic Chrome when you want them quieter still
• 0 — most of the time
• +1 to +2 — PRO Neg. or ETERNA when they feel too thin

(On ACROS and Monochrome the parameter does nothing.)

Clarity (−5 to +5)

Clarity is not sharpness. Sharpness works on the fine structure at an edge; clarity works on local contrast — differences in brightness at a medium scale.

Why halos appear

Simplified, clarity is a large-radius edge enhancement: blur a copy of the image, then amplify the difference between the original and that blurred copy. Where the difference is large — at boundaries — tones get pushed apart. Where it is small, in flat areas, almost nothing happens.

“Large radius” is the operative part. Sharpness uses a tiny radius affecting a pixel or two at the edge. Clarity’s radius is far wider, so what it pushes apart is not only the edge but a band tens of pixels deep on either side of it. Along a high-contrast boundary that shows up as the dark side going darker and the light side lighter — the unnatural dark rim people call a halo.

So the side effect is scene-dependent. On a flat wall, on fog, on water, +3 is harmless. On branches against sky, roof lines against sky, building edges, +2 may already show.

Two practical notes

1. Clarity noticeably slows writing. Set to anything other than 0, per-frame processing takes longer and the burst buffer suffers. The cause is precisely the “blur a copy and compare” work described above. For street and candid shooting, leave it at 0.
2. Negative values are an excellent portrait tool. Clarity −2 softens medium-scale skin structure — pores, fine lines, uneven tone — without smearing eyes or individual hairs, because those are fine detail and belong to sharpness. It looks far more natural than any beauty mode.

Suggested: portraits −2 to −1, landscape and architecture +1 to +2, candids 0.

While we are here: sharpness (−4 to +4)

Since it keeps coming up as the contrast case, finish it off. Sharpness moves the contrast of the one or two pixels sitting on an edge — a very small radius, so it changes how crisp the picture looks rather than how substantial it feels.

Its side effect lives at the same scale: too much gives edges a brittle, stepped quality and amplifies noise along with detail, which is why adding sharpness to a high-ISO frame makes the grain both more visible and uglier.

The default of 0 is usually right; X-Trans has no low-pass filter and starts out crisp. If you must move it, −1 at high ISO and +1 for landscape, and no further.

Color Chrome Effect (OFF / WEAK / STRONG)

This one exists for a single, specific problem: saturated colour that has no gradation left in it.

The mechanism: no room left to be light or dark in

Deep red flowers, vivid signage, a saturated sky — the trouble with these areas is that as a colour is pushed towards the edge of the gamut, the room it has for variation in brightness is squeezed out. The result on the picture is an even patch of colour: you know there is a lantern there, but you cannot see that it is round.

Color Chrome Effect gives back a little of that: it trades a small amount of saturation in those high-saturation areas for tonal separation. It acts only where saturation is high, leaving skin and low-saturation areas essentially untouched. So:

• Flowers, festivals, signage, bright clothing → STRONG
• Everyday shooting → WEAK or OFF
• It also slows writing slightly

The test is simple: enlarge the densest patch of colour. If you cannot tell whether the shape is round or flat, turn it on.

Color Chrome FX Blue (OFF / WEAK / STRONG)

The same idea applied to blue alone — deeper skies and water with more separation in them.

Excellent for landscape, with one caution: it affects every blue in the frame, including blue clothing, the blue cast inside shadows, and distant hills made blue by aerial perspective. Turn it off when photographing people — denim collapsing into a flat navy block, or a face going faintly cyan in shade, are the usual accidents.

Grain effect (size × strength)

Simulated film grain, in two dimensions:

• Strength: weak / strong
• Size: small / large

Large grain reads on a small screen; small grain needs enlargement. This is purely a style control with no technical benefit.

What is worth knowing is why film grain existed at all. The light-sensitive layer of film is silver halide crystals suspended in gelatin, and a larger crystal is more likely to be struck by a photon — so fast films used larger crystals, and graininess became visually welded to high sensitivity. That is why adding grain to a digital file reads as film and as reportage: the visual cue was a chemical inevitability long before it was an aesthetic.

In practice: weak and small with ACROS, which gives the file some of film’s substance without dirtying it; very sparing in colour, where it turns into a cheap filter quickly. Grain is applied to the JPEG, so like clarity it affects the straight-out-of-camera file and not the RAW.

White balance shift

Two-dimensional fine adjustment beyond colour temperature (see the white balance chapter). This is the heart of most home-made recipes, because it produces casts no film simulation offers on its own.

Common uses:

• R −1, B +1 — cooler shadows, cleaner skin; pairs well with Classic Chrome
• R +1, B −2 — warm and yellowish overall, close to an old print
• R +2, B +1 — a magenta lean that makes Classic Neg. more like a consumer negative

Order matters. Fix the white balance reference first — a preset, or a temperature in Kelvin — and only then apply the shift. Doing it the other way round, leaving AWB active and adding a shift on top, produces unpredictable results, because AWB may choose a different reference for every frame and your shift is stacked on something that moves.

Common failures and how to diagnose them

What you see: bright areas are blank white and highlight tone −2 does not bring them back. Usual cause: those areas clipped at the moment of exposure. This is not a distribution problem. What to change: deal with it one step earlier — negative exposure compensation, or DR200/DR400 from the previous chapter. Highlight tone can only redistribute levels that still exist.

What you see: after adding clarity, a dirty dark rim appears where sky meets branches. Usual cause: large-radius local contrast leaving halos along high-contrast boundaries. What to change: bring clarity down to +1 or 0. Subjects like this — twigs, roof lines, cables — are the wrong place for it.

What you see: burst shooting slows and the buffer fills quickly. Usual cause: clarity is non-zero or Color Chrome is on, lengthening per-frame processing. What to change: in the custom setting you use for candid and burst work, set clarity to 0 and Color Chrome off. This is one of the reasons the next chapter allocates C1–C7 by situation.

What you see: Color Chrome STRONG appears to do nothing at all. Usual cause: the scene has no highly saturated areas, so there is nothing for it to act on. What to change: nothing — and no need to switch it off either, since it costs almost no processing time when it has no work. Seeing no effect in ordinary scenes is correct behaviour.

What you see: in portraits, denim and shaded faces go blue. Usual cause: FX Blue is on, and it acts on every blue including the ones you were not thinking about. What to change: switch FX Blue off whenever there are people in the frame. Save it for skies.

What you see: a recipe that looked wonderful yesterday goes wrong indoors today. Usual cause: the white balance shift is stacked on AWB, and the light source changed, so the reference moved underneath it. What to change: fix white balance to a preset or a stated temperature so the shift has something stable to sit on.

Menu paths

Identical on both bodies; all of these live under IMAGE QUALITY SETTING.

Item	Menu name	Range
Sharpness	SHARPNESS	−4 to +4
Highlight tone	HIGHLIGHT TONE	−2 to +4
Shadow tone	SHADOW TONE	−2 to +4
Colour (saturation)	COLOR	−4 to +4
Clarity	CLARITY	−5 to +5
Saturated-colour gradation	COLOR CHROME EFFECT	OFF / WEAK / STRONG
Blue gradation	COLOR CHROME FX BLUE	OFF / WEAK / STRONG
Grain	GRAIN EFFECT	strength weak/strong × size small/large
White balance shift	WHITE BALANCE → pick a reference → press OK	R/B, ±9 each

The shift is the only one hidden a level down: after choosing a white balance reference, do not back out — pressing OK opens a two-axis red/blue against cyan/yellow grid, and the shift is set there. Plenty of owners never find that screen, because nothing at the first level advertises it.

Where the names come from

These parameters look like digital inventions. Two of them are named directly after darkroom practice.

Clarity descends from unsharp masking. The darkroom method was to sandwich the original negative with a deliberately out-of-focus positive and print through both. The blurred layer cancels the low-frequency content, so contrast at boundaries is relatively strengthened. The “unsharp” in the name is that deliberately blurred mask. Clarity +2 in a camera menu performs the same idea, with computation standing in for the sandwich.

ETERNA Bleach Bypass is named after a processing choice. Colour processing includes a bleach step that removes the developed silver and leaves only the dye image. Skip — bypass — that step and the silver stays, so a black-and-white image sits on top of the colour one: saturation drops hard and contrast climbs. Cinema of the nineties loved it. Fujifilm turned the result into a simulation and kept the name of the chemistry.

The practical payoff of knowing this: these are not sliders somebody invented to be adjustable. Each corresponds to something people once had to do by hand, which is why each has a defined reach and a defined cost, rather than being decoration to be pushed until it looks nice.

A decision list for the field

When something disappoints you, find the responsible parameter here:

What bothers you	Move this	Not this
Whole frame too bright or dark	Exposure compensation	Highlight / shadow tone
Bright areas have gone flat (cloud, white walls)	Highlight tone −, or DR	Colour
Shadows look grey and weak	Shadow tone +	Clarity
Shadows are blocked up	Shadow tone −	Exposure compensation (moves both ends)
Colour too weak	Change simulation first, then colour +1	Colour +4
Texture lacks substance (rock, stone, old timber)	Clarity +1 to +2	Sharpness
Skin too coarse	Clarity −2	Colour
A dense colour has gone flat	Color Chrome STRONG	Colour − (thins everything else too)
Sky is dull	FX Blue WEAK to STRONG	Colour + (drags greens along)
Atmosphere is wrong	White balance and shift	Film simulation
Edges not crisp at 100%	Sharpness +1	Clarity (different scale entirely)
High-ISO grain looks ugly	Sharpness −1	Grain effect (that adds, not removes)

One reminder before you go out: all of these get stored inside custom settings, so the real workflow is not adjusting them frame by frame but tuning them once, saving the set, and switching between sets in the field. Which is the next chapter.

This frame is waiting for your photograph