It’s amazing to me how one setting adjustment can have a major effect on the look of a picture. I take advantage of this when making film simulation recipes, creating all sorts of different picture aesthetics through various setting changes. Sometimes, though, I find myself stuck in a rut, and I need to find some inspiration somewhere—occasionally I need to shift to find that inspiration.

Note: this was a Creative Collective article, but now it’s available to everyone.

I was hoping to find a spark of creativity, so I picked up my Fujifilm X-T1 and began playing with White Balance Shift. I went to all eight points, going extreme with +/- 9 for Red and/or Blue. Would I find something interesting? This isn’t the first time that I’ve done this test. I’ve experimented pretty extensively with White Balance and White Balance Shift over the years. I wasn’t going to discover something previously unknown, but maybe I’d see something that would ignite some inspiration, which would lead to… I wasn’t sure what just yet.

Below is my White Balance Shift test. I chose a snowy scene because I wanted a lot of white in the picture, reprocessing in-camera on my X-T1 a RAW file that I captured a month ago. I used Provia, DR200, Highlight 0, Shadow 0, Color 0, Sharpness 0, and Noise Reduction -2. Take a look at the pictures:

That didn’t inspire me. Maybe one of the pictures above looks interesting to you, but they were just too extreme for me. Perhaps the two with 0 Red were the ones that I “liked” most (or disliked least).

I repeated the test, but went less extreme. Instead of +/- 9, I tried +/- 5. This gave similar results as above, just much less extreme. There were aspects of all eight exposures that I appreciated, but one in particular stood out to me. It wasn’t necessarily the “best” one but simply the one that caught my attention as interesting. Check out the less-extreme test below.

Of the eight, the one that intrigued me the most was -5 Red & -5 Blue. It has a green tint that’s different from a lot of my film simulation recipes. Yes, 0 Red & -5 Blue is probably the “best” of the group, but something about the green image caught my attention the most. I wanted to play with that look some more, and see what I might create. I found the inspiration that I was searching for!

I bring up all of this because I wanted to give you a little behind-the-scenes look at how I created the Scanned Negative recipe that I recently published. These experiments are where it began. From there, I tried different film simulations—I wasn’t completely happy with Provia—and decided on PRO Neg. Std instead. Color went to -2, Highlight changed to -1, and, after a few more experiments, White Balance was adjusted to 5300K -5R & -4B.

Sometimes when I’m feeling especially uninspired, just picking up a camera and shooting with it will get those creative juices flowing, but sometimes I need just a little more. In this case, it took in-camera reprocessing and some extensive experimenting. So if you find yourself in a rut, my suggestion is to grab your camera and shoot with it; if you need a little more to get yourself unstuck, you’ll have to go to further extremes. That might entail a shift, maybe even a White Balance Shift—at least it did for me.

Going back to the opening sentence, it is indeed amazing how one setting change can profoundly affect the aesthetic of a picture. A fun experiment you can try if you are looking for something different is to pick a film simulation recipe—perhaps your favorite—and make one adjustment to it and see what happens. Maybe you won’t like it as much, but maybe you’ll like it even more. You won’t know until you try.