Tidal Amber Marsh: a Fujifilm recipe for landscape

Today's Luma recipe is a landscape look built on Nostalgic Neg, which is an odd choice for scenery at first glance because the simulation leans warm and amber on its own. The recipe pulls that back with the white balance. It fixes the temperature at 5600K and then shifts it -2 red and -2 blue, which takes some of the orange out of the midtones while leaving the faded, low-contrast character of the simulation intact. Colour is at -1 on top of that, so reeds, bracken and mud come out as browns and olives rather than saturated autumn colour.

Highlights and shadows are both at -1, and DR200 protects the sky, so a pale overcast morning keeps its tone instead of going flat white. That matters here because the recipe is meant for flat light, where the sky is often the brightest thing in the frame by a wide margin. Exposure compensation is only +0.3, and I'd watch the histogram on water, since a bright reflection can still clip at that setting even with DR200 on.

Clarity at +2 is what gives grass and distant treelines some depth, and like every recipe that uses it, it adds a short processing pause after each frame on most X-Trans bodies. For wide, slow landscape work that pause hardly matters. Noise reduction sits at -3 with Weak, Large grain, so above ISO 800 the files get noticeably textured, which suits the look more than it hurts it.

Settings

• Film simulation: Nostalgic Neg
• Dynamic range: DR200
• D-range priority: Off
• Grain effect: Weak, Large
• Color chrome effect: Weak
• Color chrome FX blue: Weak
• White balance: 5600K
• White balance shift: -2 Red, -2 Blue
• Highlights: -1
• Shadows: -1
• Color: -1
• Sharpness: +1
• Noise reduction: -3
• Clarity: +2
• ISO: 320 to 1600
• Exposure compensation: +0.3

It works on the X-T5, X-T50, X-H2, X-H2S, X-S20, X-M5, X-E5, X100VI, GFX100 II, GFX100S II and GFX100RF.

The full recipe is on Luma's daily page, with a new one every day.