📸 Moody Hanoi, a Cinestill 800T/Kodak Vision3 500T Fujifilm film simulation recipe

Introduction

My favorite film stock ever is Vision3 500T, especially when shooting photos of my city Hanoi in overcast/winter days.

In daytime the tone is colder, with hints of blue in the shadows. At night, led/fluorescent lights have a teal color, and tungsten lights appear orange with hints of green, combined to give you the classic teal and orange look. 

I recently got a Fujifilm xt30ii after years of looking from over the fence. First thing I do is looking for recipes of film stocks.

And being my favorite stock ever, I scoured the internet for Cinestill 800T/Vision3 500T recipes. In case you didn’t know, Cinestill 800T is just Kodak Vision3 500T with halations.

I didn’t like any of them though. None of them really feels like “Kodak Vision” to me. The recipes on fujixweekly (as much as I love the site), doesn’t really feel right.

So I set out to make my own version. While we can all agree on the fact that you can’t never replace a film stock with digital, I think I’ve got something in my hands here that resemble “Kodak Vision”.

Get a print of this image on my print shop here

I had this recipe on the kitchen for a long time. I kept going back to the white balance and WB shifts, trying to “perfect” it.

In the end, the decision for me is whether to fully embrace the stylized look, or dial it back to keep things more nuanced. I chose the latter, so the recipe would be a bit more versatile.

This recipe tends to work pretty well in many situations for me, except on very bright sunny days, it looks kinda washed out. Otherwise, overcast days and night shots have been great.

There are a few characteristics that I want to match: The general color vibe (the reds and greens specifically), the teal cast on white lights, and green/orange cast on incandescent/fluorescent lights. In general I think I’ve done it.

I went through a lot of references, but I don’t want to put the images directly here (deathly scared of getting dcma-ed/sued 😂). There’s this youtube video I found with a lot of samples though.

Anyways, you’ve heard enough of my yapping. Now to the good stuff.

This is a recipe for X-trans IV and above sensors (XE4, XT30ii, X100V, etc) because that’s what I use. If you use an X-trans V camera, the consensus seems to be reducing Color Chrome FX Blue from strong to weak because that sensor renders blue more deeply.

Here’s the recipe:

I call it Moody Hanoi, because it’s what it feels like. It feels a bit weird that I get to name things now 🤷.

Film Simulation: Classic Negative

Dynamic Range: DR400

Grain Effect: Strong, Large

Color Chrome Effect: Strong

Color Chrome FX Blue: Strong

White Balance: 4300K, Red -4 & Blue -5

Highlight: -2

Shadow: -1

Color: -1

Sharpness: -1

High ISO NR: -4

Clarity: -4 (Or 0 and a white/black mist filter, which is mostly what I did)

ISO: Auto, up to ISO 12800 (I love the “noise” of X-trans sensors. Sometimes I even bump the ISO to 12800 intentionally)

Exposure Compensation: Typically -1/3 to -1

Please tag me @grainyjpegs on Instagram/Threads if you use my recipe. I’d love to see more photos of this recipe!

Some explanation below

First, the base sim: Classic Negative. 

Oh good ol’ classic negative. There are so many classic negative recipes. For good reasons I suppose. It just feels good. It just feels right.

I’ve looked at a lot of Kodak Vision photos, both online and in my archive, and the greens and reds in Classic Negative just hit very close to home. Turquoise green tones, that’s the name!

Strong, large grain. If you feel daring, you can try this extra thing: Set ISO in the 3200-12800 range! (I think I just made a bunch of photography “purists” very angry 😂). I unironically really love the “digital noise” that the x-trans sensor produce.

Highlights -2 and shadows -1, and DR400 for more dynamic range. The film stock just has a lot of dynamic range in general.

I also underexpose the images somewhere between -1/3 stop to -1 stop, which gives back some contrast and saturation to the image, and also adds to the gritty look and feel. 

White Balance at 4300K, Red -4 and Blue -5. This is probably the setting that took the most time to get right. I pretty much tried every temperature and every color shift combination that leans teal/orange.

I actually tried 20 more combinations after this, landed on something I liked again. And then I realized, it was the first combination all along, just in a different shape (Fluroescent 2, R-7 and B-5, which turns out exactly the same 🥹). 

Sharpness -1, and Clarity -4 (Or 0 and a mist filter) to make the image a bit softer, more dreamy and add glow to the highlights. I use a mist filter now because it also lifts the blacks up a bit too for that faded look.

You can also add the red halations in post if you like the Cinestill 800T look, but I don't like them anyways.

And... that’s it. I hope you like it.

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