Fujitography by Veijo Matikainen

Uninstalled the X-RAW Studio

This might be a rant. Towards Fuji. But I have overcome the moment of having feelings about this. My X-H1 has a broken USB-port. It cannot get connection to my computer and thus to X-RAW Studio anymore. I guess I have had my share of experimenting with the film simulations. It is very unfortunate, that the X-RAW Studio is dependant of the camera. And so eventually there comes a time when the X-RAW Studio becomes useless.

I primarily use Capture One for post processing. But I love that my camera can produce beautiful JPEGs SOOC. I can still tune the looks in-camera, but is is a burden compared to the possibility to test different settings in X-RAW -studio.

Short sigh. Life goes on. And maybe I can afford a new camera at some point.

My in-camera film simulations are based on my previous experience and I have mostly now shot photos with Astia. It just looks so good with different subjects, were it nature, urban or people related. Astia is also a film simulation that can be tweaked to many different looks, though I mostly use only one setup with it.

Now, back to Capture One…

NS160 III (Capture One -style)

This particular look has enticed me from the very beginning of using Capture One. With two iterations before I still wanted to study this look more and make it even more likable. The film which has given the name for this look is not familiar to me but from all the pictures I have seen in the web. I hope the look is similar enough that the naming is not too much off for the style.

Obsolete 5600K Capture One -style

I have now been tweaking a new style for quite a long time. The style started with my Classic Chrome look-alike -style (Basics CC -style) and progressed like twigs of a tree into many different paths. I “cut the twigs” that weren’t to my liking and continued with one certain path. I collected cues of the look of newer Kodachrome slides and continued tweaking the style with some ingredients that I haven’t used before. The look grow into an acceptable film look-alike style. I couldn’t get the colors and contrast into such extremes I aimed to, so the final look is quite balanced for different scenarios. There are Kodak -kind wild reds and yellows and some smaller color tweaks. The style is quite picky on exposure and many times needs a positive exposure compensation. A low exposure look is not intentional.

Nostalgic Portra Capture One -style

Having tuned many insignificant styles since my last post I found out that my styles K400 Light and P400 Warm were approaching same goal with very different results. I decided to try how they look when I combine their looks. I had in mind a “memory” of a look that some photos taken with Portra 400 film have. And it was warm and light at the same time.

Sunny Seventies Capture One -style

This time my experiments lead me to try my hand with a look that I named Sunny Seventies. The look took some cues from some photos I saw being taken in the seventies. I could have taken the look much further but decided to stop at a certain point, for now. There is some color twists going on, and the style won’t work for a wide variety of subjects. It really needs a bright sunny scene and there it offers it’s intended look. Hope You find this study interesting, even if it wasn’t so useful to You. 🙂

P400 Warm Capture One -style

On the heels of the K400 Light -style I made just another Kodak colors (warm colors) inspired style. How many one can make? Answer is, quite a few.

K400 Light Capture One -style

I have seen a lot of photos either taken with Kodak Portra 400 or film emulations for digital files resembling Portra 400 to look a bit flat in contrast. It probably comes from the look that the film gets when it is underexposed a bit. And just because I like to make a variety of styles I wanted to try my hand with this kind of look.

Basics CC -style for Capture One

Fuji’s film simulation Classic Chrome was for a long time a favorite style among Fuji camera users. Now it has lost some of it’s appeal for those Fuji camera users that have access to the Classic Negative. Neither of these film simulations have appealed to me. But I wanted to understand better why the Classic Chrome doesn’t work for me. And I wanted to see if there were any way to improve the look for my own use.

I didn’t want to start with the Capture One’s original Classic Chrome style (which is limited to be used with Fuji’s RAF-files) but made a version for myself from the scratch. My version is not an exact copy of the film simulation, but I tried to copy the look as much I could so that I had “right” look to start from.