📸 Fujifilm Recipe EP7: "Kodacolor 200"

Photos in this post were shot using “Kodacolor 200” recipe from a member of film.recipes facebook group. Recipe down below.

This photo is available on my print shop here

Hello friends,

I’m finally getting over my slumber and ready to share these photos I shot with what’s quickly become one of my favorite recipes: “Kodacolor 200” by Brian Kaldorf in the film.recipes Facebook group!

So there are quite a few “Kodak Gold” recipes floating around, but they didn’t really click with me. Something was “missing”, compared to the shot I made on the stock.

For me, it’s this faded, low contrast look that I don’t quite know how to describe. Luckily I have some photos I took with Kodak Gold that isn’t too embarrassingly bad to share.

One film stock can take on many different looks depends on how you scan and correct the photos. But, for me, this is the “Kodak Gold” look in my mind now, and many recipes I found never really “did it”.

So it’s been quite lucky that I found this recipe, just randomly browsing the group. The samples caught my eye with that “look” and I’m immediately drawn to this recipe. The creator mentioned this recipe is his attempt at mimicking “Kodacolor 200”, which from my research seems to be a “rebranded” version of Kodak Gold. And I’m sold. So here’s the…

“Kodacolor 200”, a Kodak Gold-ish recipe

I’m writing the recipe down here for easier access, but all credits go to Brian!

Film Simulation: Eterna

Dynamic Range: DR400

Grain Effect: Weak, Small

Color Chrome Effect: Weak

Color Chrome FX Blue: Strong

White Balance: Fluorescent 2, R+5 B-6

Highlight: -0.5

Shadow: -1

Color: -2

Sharpness: -1

High ISO NR: -4

My experience

So I took the recipe to shoot a few things in my city, and then I went on a short trip to Nha Trang days after, shooting mostly this recipe on daytime. And I’ve got to say, I’m in love with it!

The colors are warm, soft and low contrast, thanks to Eterna as the base, DR400, and a soft tone curve. This is exactly what I had in mind for a Kodak Gold recipe.

The warm tint in there with the White Balance shift adds quite a bit of nostalgic feeling to it.

Oh and I shot many of these on my new toy: The 7artisans 25mm f2, a dirt cheap manual “pancake” lens, which I wrote a review here a few days ago. This recipe and lens combo served me very well.

The low contrast, low saturation of the recipe, combined with the vintage look of the lens, makes for very beautiful, soft, and dare I say, “filmic” photos.

I don’t shoot portraits that often, but the ones I took were quite nice, with nice skin tones, soft shadows, and a warm look.

This recipe is usable at night and in artificial lighting conditions as well, although sometimes it might be a tad too warm, depends on the lighting.

But just like shooting film, such is the way of fixed white balance. I don’t shoot this at night often, because I like my night shots to be colder in temperature, but few times I did it turned out alright.

This recipe used Eterna as a base, which is a bit less common than Classic Chrome/Classic Negative recipes. I didn’t expect to like it this much, because I really love the Classic Neg look. But well, one can like many things I guess 🤷.

Here are some more photos I took with this recipe.

I really like this portrait I took for my mom for an unrelated reason: This one was shot wide open on the XF 35mm F1.4, and dare I say, there’s some of that mythical Medium Format look in here 😂. This damn lens really do be having that extra magic sometimes with its renderings and “3D pop”!

And that’s it. As always, subscribe to the newsletter to see more mediocre photos I took with different recipes. Next episode: My take on a Harman Phoenix 200 recipe!

Disclaimer: Some of the links in the post are affiliate links. You know the drill.