If you’ve just discovered the world of Fujifilm Film Simulation Recipes — welcome. You’re about to unlock one of the most satisfying aspects of shooting with a Fujifilm camera: beautiful, film-inspired JPEGs straight out of the camera, with no editing required.
Here at Fuji X Passion, we’re excited to be sharing Recipes [free and premium] with you — both from our own testing and from our community of readers. But before you dive in, it’s worth understanding exactly what a Recipe is and how to get it into your camera.
So, what is a Film Simulation Recipe?
Think of it as a carefully chosen combination of in-camera JPEG settings — Film Simulation, White Balance, Highlight, Shadow, Colour, Sharpness, Noise Reduction, Grain, and more — tuned to evoke the look of a particular film stock or aesthetic. The camera already has all the tools; a Recipe simply tells it how to use them together. The result is a distinct, consistent look that you can apply to your shooting without touching a computer afterwards.
On the newest Fujifilm bodies, a Recipe will typically include: Film Simulation, Dynamic Range, Grain Effect, Colour Chrome Effect, Colour Chrome FX Blue, White Balance (and WB Shift), Highlight, Shadow, Colour, Sharpness, High ISO NR, Clarity, and suggested Exposure Compensation. Older cameras have fewer parameters — some won’t have Grain or Colour Chrome at all — but the principle is exactly the same.
Where do you enter these settings?
The place to enter a Recipe into your camera is the Edit/Save Custom Settings menu, found within the Image Quality settings. A handy shortcut on most Fujifilm cameras: press the Q button to open the Quick Menu, then press and hold it to jump straight into the Edit/Save Custom Settings screen. It saves a lot of menu-diving once you know it.
Most Fujifilm cameras offer seven Custom Setting slots — often labelled C1 through C7. Each slot can hold a completely independent Recipe. A handful of models (such as the X-S10 and X-S20) offer only four slots, and some older bodies don’t have Custom Settings at all — in those cases, you programme the Recipe parameters directly into the IQ Menu.
One thing worth knowing if you have an older camera: the Fujifilm X-T3, X-T30 (not the X-T30 II), and anything earlier cannot save a White Balance Shift inside a Custom Setting slot. You can still use WB Shift, but you’ll need to set it separately via the White Balance menu within the IQ settings, and the camera will only remember one shift per WB type. If you’re using an older body, choosing Recipes that share the same WB Shift — or that use different WB types — will make life a lot easier.
A few practical tips before you start
The suggested Exposure Compensation in any Recipe is a starting point, not a rule. Every scene is different, and you should trust your own judgement for each shot. Similarly, feel free to tweak any Recipe to suit your taste — if you prefer a slightly different colour rendering or find the grain too heavy, adjust it. These are meant to inspire, not constrain.
If your camera is one of the newer models (roughly from the X-E4 onwards), Custom Settings save far more than just image parameters — they include focus modes, sound settings, and other camera-wide preferences. A good strategy is to set up C1 exactly as you want it for general shooting, then copy that preset into C2 through C7. From there, you only need to change the image quality parameters for each Recipe, and the rest of the settings will stay consistent across all your slots. It’s also worth disabling Auto Update Custom Setting if your camera has that option, to prevent your carefully saved Recipes from being overwritten accidentally.
The “bonus” slot
On the newest Fujifilm cameras, there’s actually an eighth Recipe available beyond C1–C7. When you cycle through the Custom Settings in the Quick Menu, between C7 and C1 you’ll pass through the standard shooting mode (A, S, P, or M). Whatever you have programmed into the IQ Menu at that point acts as an additional Recipe — a bonus slot that’s easy to overlook but very handy once you know about it.
Settings that aren’t part of the Recipe
A few things are intentionally left out of Recipes, as they’re very much down to personal preference. Image size, RAW or JPEG, metering mode, and colour space are all yours to decide. For what it’s worth, shooting Fine+RAW is a popular choice because it gives you the beautiful in-camera JPEG alongside a RAW file that can be reprocessed in-camera later — very useful for experimenting with different looks from the same original capture. Shooting RAW+JPEG also means that if you fall in love with a Recipe, you can apply other looks to the same shot afterwards without ever leaving the camera.
Getting started
If you’re feeling a little uncertain navigating the menus for the first time, don’t worry — it gets easier quickly. Your camera’s manual is always the definitive reference for your specific model (Fujifilm publishes these online at fujifilm-x.com), and there are several helpful walkthrough videos on YouTube that demonstrate the process on various bodies.
We’ll be publishing Recipes here at Fuji X Passion regularly — our own creations as well as contributions from the community. Each one will list all the settings you need, along with sample images so you know what to expect. If you’ve developed a Recipe of your own that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you [here].
Happy shooting.
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