Anders Lindborg has created or co-created a number of Film Simulation Recipes found on Fuji X Weekly, including my personal favorite: Kodak Tri-X 400. Some others are Kodak T-Max P3200, Kodak T-Max 400, Ilford FP4 Plus 125, Ilford HP5 Plus 400, Ilford Pan F Plus 50, Kodak Gold v2, seven Fujicolor Pro 160NS Recipes, and seven Fujicolor Pro 400H Recipes. He also made an important D-Range Priority discovery. Oh, and more are coming soon!

This morning I awoke to an email in my inbox from Anders. As a Christmas gift to you, he wanted to share his methods for creating Film Simulation Recipes that he has developed and put to use. This formula can be used by anyone. I have taken a similar approach a number of times myself (I do it in-camera, and not with X RAW Studio), although—for me—Recipes can come about many different ways; I don’t have one single method, but perhaps a handful of various approaches. I discussed it a bit in my Emulsion ’86 article.

Anders’ step-by-step formula is a path that you can follow to create your own Recipes that are certain to be accurate to any film aesthetic that you’d like to mimic. Oftentimes you can easily find the film spec sheets with a quick Google search, but for some emulsions you’ll have to dig deeper, or maybe you won’t find them at all. Many spec sheets for Kodak films are readily available, for example, but you may have trouble finding them for other brands or long-discontinued emulsions. If you can locate the spec sheet, then you can begin Step 1. If you don’t have or use X RAW Studio, you can do this in-camera, but it is probably a little easier to do with X RAW Studio; either way, it does require shooting RAW+JPEG so that you can reprocess the RAW file.

Thank you, Anders Lindborg, for sharing this with everyone! Even if you have no interest in creating a Film Simulation Recipe yourself, perhaps this gives you an idea of the incredible effort that sometimes goes into creating one.

Anders’ Film Simulation Development Method

1. Download all reference material you need, including film spec sheets. This is really important to have, if you want to create a realistic simulation. You will need a good chart of color wavelength in nanometers as well, to be able to use this method.
2. Load some reference photos into X Raw Studio. Select a good one that is taken at noon, as this used to be the official reference for film daylight temperature.
   Note: The time when the photo is taken is important. Don’t cheat!
3. Select the base Film Simulation you think is most similar to the film you actually want to simulate. Sometimes, the general characteristics are more important than the color scheme being spot on.
4. Choose the Dynamic Range you think is most correct for your simulation. The characteristic curves chart from the spec sheets can be a lot of help here.
5. Set the White Balance (in kelvin) to a value that corresponds to the color of the film base layer. This will most likely make your colors look really off, but don’t worry about that right now.
   Note: It helps knowing where the film was created, as the daylight temperature varies quite a bit depending on where in the world you are located.
6. Check the spec sheets and find out what colors of the second and third (with Fuji, sometimes a fourth) layers are. Look at the spectral sensitivity chart to find how the colors are distributed and which color is most prominent. Locate the highest peak of the dominant color and check the specified wavelength of the peak.
7. Look in the color wavelength chart and find the color that corresponds to the wavelength reading from the previous step. Now go back to X Raw Studio and open the WB Shift panel and locate the exact color you found. This takes some practice, but after doing it a few times it’s quite easy.
8. Now look at the colors of your photo and check the color distribution compared to the spectral sensitivity chart. Make any adjustments needed to balance out the color distribution.
9. Look in the spec sheets again and locate the spectral dye density curves chart. This chart describes the tonality of the film. Adjust Highlight, Shadow, and Clarity as needed.
10. Any other parameters needed should be set at this step. These include Grain, Sharpness, Color Chrome Effects, Noise Reduction, etc.. Note that changing a single parameter can have a huge impact, so be careful here!
11. Look at your photo again. Do the colors look like they should? If not, make more adjustments to either your selected White Balance or WB Shift. Only minor adjustments should be needed at this step.
12. Save your current recipe and apply it to your other reference photos in X Raw Studio. Compare them to photos found on Flickr and film review sites. Keep in mind that many of them are developed and scanned at home, so you need to learn how different development and scanning methods affect the final result! Adjust the recipe as needed and keep reapplying it to your reference photos and double check them over and over again.
13. If you think you might be done, it’s time to test it for real! Load the recipe into your camera and get out there. Try taking photos that mimics what you’ve found on the Internet so they are somewhat comparable. It’s all about details here, so keep iterating from Step 8 until you are happy. With hard work and a bit of luck, you’ll have a spot on clone of the original film!

“Don’t forget to share your creation with the world,” Anders Lindborg wrote, “and feel happy about contributing to the community! Just keep in mind that this is more of learning how to best mimic the original film, rather than creating an exact copy. There are so many variables that can affect the final result of real film and the most important part here is that the general behavior is the same. This method is proven to work for both color and black & white simulations and is all based on color science. Several successful simulations have been created while developing the method, so this is several years of blood, sweat and tears that have been compressed into these steps. While this method might look very advanced, trust me when I say that it works and that it’s worth the effort! Not only the general look of the film will be simulated, but also its behavior in different situations, including weird color shifts and other general quirks. The results have amazed me several times!”