Film Simulation Recipes for Fujifilm cameras are extremely popular right now. I’ve been making them for over nine years, but it was around four years ago that they really began to take off. Back in 2017—months before I even started the Fuji X Weekly website, which first came online on August 21, 2017—I published my first two Film Simulation Recipes on a previous website that I used to run (which I closed down weeks before starting this one). Fuji X Weekly was originally intended as a long-term review of the Fujifilm X100F, and Recipes were only a small part of it at first. I called it Fuji X Weekly because I initially intended to publish one article per week, but I’ve exceeded that almost every week since giving it that name.

Early on I published two Fujifilm Recipes, one color using Classic Chrome and one B&W using Acros. These were modeled after two presets I commonly used in a software called Alien Skin Exposure, which I was really into at the time. I was shooting RAW+JPEG, and I had noticed that my edited RAWs didn’t look much different than the straight-out-of-camera JPEGs. I wondered if I made some adjustments to the in-camera settings, could I get them even closer? Sure enough, I could. With that I made my first two Recipes, which I dubbed Film Simulation Recipes.

I wasn’t the first to make Fujifilm Recipes. An early example dates back to October 2016, when Fujifilm published an article by Derek Clark called X-Pro2 in Barcelona (the article is no longer available), which, in a section discussing the limitations of Film Simulation Bracket, he wished for “our own recipe of Highlights, Shadows, NR, Colour and Sharpness baked in” for each of the three film simulations (instead of the same settings applied to all). In a different section of the same article, he provided the Color, Highlight, Shadow, Noise Reduction, and Sharpness that he used with Classic Chrome and Acros. While some settings were left out (for example, Dynamic Range, White Balance, WB Shift, and Grain), the basic framework for a Fujifilm Recipe was included, and (in the article) the word “recipe” was used to describe a set of settings, although he opted for “my settings” (instead of explicitly calling them Recipes) when it came to the actual parameters.

I discovered a bunch more who were making Fujifilm Recipes (although not by name) even earlier: Fredrik Averpil, Mathieu Gasquet, Marco Secchi, Marco Larousse, Thomas Benezeth, Eivind Rohne, Patrick La Roque, Kevin Bjorke, Kevin Mullins, Thomas Fitzgerald, and Bryan Gateb. There were probably others, too. These were the Fujifilm Recipe pioneers, paving the way with custom profiles, setting combinations, custom settings, favorite settings, programs, film emulsions, ready to go colour, film looks, picture profiles, and go-to settings for their Fujifilm cameras, publishing them online for the community—they deserve recognition for starting what would become a major trend many years later. Fuji X Weekly arrived immediately afterwards. I coined the name Film Simulation Recipe for Fujifilm JPEG parameters; however, it doesn’t matter who named it, I only mention it here because I’ve been asked a few hundred times who came up with the name. What I can say for certain is that this website played a major role in popularizing the term, and now it’s a part of the Fujifilm vernacular. Fujifilm even used “Recipe” in the X-E5!

The word “recipe” has been used in photography for a very long time, dating back all the way to 1856. The specific chemistry and time combinations for film development and printing have been casually called recipes for well over 150 years. In digital, Lightroom originally called their presets “Recipes” way back in 2001, and Capture One began calling their custom presets Process Recipes in 2007. Canon used the term “Recipe Data” and “DPP Recipe” in 2004 with the 1D Mark II. It’s a fairly common term in photography, becoming more widely used in the digital era within the last five or so years for in-camera JPEG customizations.

The focus of this website soon shifted from being exclusively about the X100F to all-things-Fujifilm, not restricted to one single model. Film Simulation Recipes were only a small part of it. I noticed that the Recipe articles tended to get more views than the others, so I put more energy into creating Recipes. Before long the catalog was over 50, with more being developed regularly. Since my background was in film photography, I tended to make Recipes that resembled different film stocks that I had shot or that I had a collection of negatives or slides for as reference.

Outside of a relatively small but growing community, nobody had heard of Recipes for Fujifilm cameras in 2019, not even Fujifilm. They first learned about it in 2020 from a photographer who told them he enjoyed shooting Portra and Tri-X on his X-series camera. Fujifilm had no idea what he was talking about, and the photographer was surprised that they were unaware of Fuji X Weekly. A few weeks later Fujifilm reached out to me to inquire what I was doing—what exactly is a Film Simulation Recipe—and that was pretty much the end of my contact with them for nearly four years. That December I launched the Fuji X Weekly App, which was the very first mobile library of Fujifilm Recipes. Initially at launch, there were 100 Recipes in the App; today, there are over 400! I don’t know how many people use Fujifilm Recipes, but over 150,000 have the Fuji X Weekly App on their phones right now, and there are many people who use my Recipes but don’t use the App, opting to get them straight from this website instead.

While the Fuji X Weekly App launch brought a lot more attention to Fujifilm Recipes, it wasn’t until the Fujifilm X100V went viral in fall of 2022 that things really began to take off. Seemingly overnight, the Recipe community doubled in size, and it’s only continued to grow since. Fuji X Weekly has been the most popular resource for Fujifilm Recipes for approaching a decade now. A few of you have been along for the journey from the beginning, some joined in fairly early on, and others are more recent. There are some photographers who are brand-new to Fujifilm and the whole Recipe concept, and have no idea the history behind it—if that’s you, welcome aboard! I hope you found this article interesting. I never imagined that this whole Film Simulation Recipe thing would grow so large, or that it would have such a profound impact on my life, the Fujifilm community, and photography as a whole. It’s been a privilege to have a front-row seat to it all, and an honor to have so many create photographs using the various Recipes that I created. I want to conclude this by saying thank you to all of you, I really appreciate you and your support.