Fujifilm white balance shift and why recipes depend on it

Put two Fujifilm recipes side by side that share a film simulation, and the thing that most often separates them is the white balance shift. Classic Chrome at Daylight with no shift and Classic Chrome at Daylight with +4 Red and -5 Blue look like two different films. This post covers how white balance and its shift work on X-Series and GFX bodies and how recipes use them. The overview of every recipe setting has the rest.

Presets, Auto and Kelvin

White balance tells the camera what colour of light the scene is lit by, so it can make neutral things neutral. There are three ways to set it.

Auto measures the scene per shot. Fujifilm bodies offer three auto modes: Auto, White Priority, which keeps whites cleaner under warm artificial light, and Ambience Priority, which keeps more of that warmth.

Presets fix the correction at a set value: Daylight, Shade, Fluorescent 1 to 3 and Incandescent, plus Underwater on many bodies. A preset gives the same colour every time, whatever the light.

Kelvin sets the correction directly, from 2500K to 10000K. Higher numbers make the image warmer and lower numbers make it cooler.

Why recipes use Shade

Shade is a correction for the blue light in open shade, so it warms the image. Used in direct sun, where there's no blue cast to cancel, it adds warmth to everything. That's why Shade appears in a lot of recipes. It works as a fixed warm filter that doesn't move from shot to shot, and a recipe needs predictable colour to work at all.

Auto white balance undoes that effect. It keeps trying to neutralise the scene, so a warm look built on Auto drifts depending on what's in the frame. Recipes that do use Auto rely on the shift for their character.

The shift grid

White balance shift moves the correction on two axes, each from -9 to +9. The red axis runs from cyan (negative) to red (positive), and the blue axis from yellow (negative) to blue (positive). Recipes write it as a pair, such as +2 Red and -4 Blue. That example adds a little red and takes away a fair amount of blue, which means warmer and more yellow, the usual direction for a film look.

A few directions show up again and again. Positive red with negative blue gives warm, golden colour, which is the common Classic Chrome and Kodachrome-style treatment. Negative red with positive blue goes cool and teal, which suits Eterna and night scenes. Negative red with negative blue pushes towards green and yellow, the tint of cheap consumer film and fluorescent-lit rooms. Big shifts of 6 or more on either axis are usually trying to imitate one specific film stock, and they look odd outside the light they were built for.

The shift is stored per mode

This is the part that catches people out. The camera keeps a separate shift for each white balance mode. Set +3 Red and -5 Blue on Daylight, switch to Auto, and the Auto shift is whatever it was last time, often zero. So when a recipe gives a mode and a shift, set the mode first and then open the shift for that mode.

Custom slots help here. On X-Trans IV and V bodies, each of the C1 to C7 slots stores its own white balance and shift, so a recipe saved to a slot brings its shift with it. The per-mode behaviour only bites when you set things by hand.

White balance on monochrome

On Acros and Monochrome, white balance and its shift have very little effect, because the colour they change is thrown away. Newer bodies have a Monochromatic Color setting that tints black and white on its own warm/cool and green/magenta axes, and a monochrome recipe will use that for its tone.

Trying shifts without walking through the menu

Getting a shift right by trial and error in the camera is slow, because every change is a trip into the menu and a test shot. Luma writes the white balance and shift as their own fields in every daily recipe, so the values are there to copy, and its Advanced Preview applies a saved recipe to one of your own photos locally so you can see which way a shift moves the colour before you touch the camera. The preview is an approximation, and small shifts of one or two steps are easier to judge on the camera's own screen.

For what each film simulation does before the shift is applied, see Fujifilm film simulations compared.

Luma is a CraftedPxl project, in open beta at lumaphoto.app. More on the Luma project page.