AP's Superia

An original re-derivation of Fujicolor Superia X-Tra 400, retuned for Indian skin tones and for the light Mumbai actually runs on indoors. This is the cool member of the AP set, and the first recipe in the bank built for tube light. Cool White later took the same lamp in the opposite direction, correcting the green out on the Fluorescent 3 preset where this one works with a Auto balance and a shift. Full derivation and evidence in the notes.

Distinct from two neighbours, and the differences are the whole point. fujicolor-superia-400 is the emulsion-faithful build and stays the honest emulation of the stock. This one departs deliberately and records where. Reggies-superia is already a Classic Negative portrait interpretation tuned for melanated skin, and it is a good one, but its −4 Blue is a heavy yellow push that behaves differently on golden-olive skin than on the tones it was built for.

The idea this recipe is built on

Superia's coolness is a blue-highlight phenomenon rather than a global chill, so the cool was moved out of the white balance and into the blue channel, where skin is not standing in front of it.

A faithful Superia build carries the cool globally, at WB −1 Red and +1 Blue. That is right for the stock and it is precisely what costs warm and olive skin, because a global cool cast desaturates the red that gives skin its life and pushes what remains toward green. The datasheet itself claims excellent skin reproduction, so the film does not make people green. The cool lives in neutrals and highlights.

Skin is not a saturated blue, so Color Chrome FX Blue does not act on it. The sky stays Superia-cool and the person in front of it does not.

The two changes that matter most

1. Shadow −1, where the faithful build runs +1. A two-notch move, and the reason on this base is specific rather than inherited.

AP's UltraMax and AP's Portra both fight a tonal problem: Classic Chrome's shadow end is hard, darker skin sits in the lower-mid zone, and hardness there costs facial detail. Classic Negative's shadow problem is chromatic instead. Fujifilm states the base's signature plainly: colours are "biased toward cyan-green in the shadows and magenta in the highlights", with "hard contrast and color contrast" (Fujifilm Official Design Notes, from the X Stories / product pages official design notes). On this base the shadow region is tinted as well as dark.

Cross that with where the skin sits. Kodak publishes separate negative-density targets by complexion, and darker skin renders at roughly half the separation from mid-grey that lighter skin does: about +0.16 against +0.31 (tables and caveats in AP's Portra and AP's UltraMax). Maharashtra skin skews warm with olive common, and olive is yellow plus green. So a cool white balance, a cyan-green shadow region, and Shadow +1 pushing the face further into it are three correct decisions for the stock that fail together on this subject.

Shadow −1 lifts the face up and out of the base's own colour bias, into the mid-tones, which is where Fujifilm says this base is deliberately at its most colourful. The correction costs no colour.

2. White Balance +1 Red, and only +1.

The other AP recipes run +2R or +3R, and they can, because they sit on Classic Chrome, which Fujifilm built with suppressed magenta. Classic Negative is the opposite: magenta-biased in the highlights by design. The bank's own tuning rule follows from that, recorded in the Fujifilm Official Design Notes, from the X Stories / product pages design notes: when highlights read pink, reduce the Red shift rather than adding Blue, because the magenta belongs to the simulation rather than to your white balance. So +2R or +3R here would drive highlights pink, which is a fault rather than warmth. +1R is the largest shift this base tolerates, and it is enough because the base is not fighting it the way Classic Chrome's cool shadows fight a warm shift.

Why these values (the rest)

• Color Chrome Effect Strong, and Color held at +2. Fujifilm states that Classic Negative applies a mid-tone saturation emphasis, staying "colorful even in the midtones", and mid-tones are where skin lives. Raising Color on this base is a direct hit on complexion, and on warm skin it goes orange quickly. Color Chrome Effect does the opposite job: it restores tonal depth inside already-saturated colour, foliage and painted walls and fabric and signage, and has almost nothing to act on in low-saturation skin. The frame gets richer where skin is not.
• Color +2 unchanged from the faithful build. Superia is a medium-saturation stock. Raising it was the obvious way to make this look more pleasing and the wrong one.
• Highlight −1.5, a half-step below the faithful build. Classic Negative runs hard contrast by Fujifilm's own description, and Indian sun is hard light. This also matches evidence rather than argument: the Mumbai place study refined its Highlight from −1 to −1.5 across 11 real frames because every hazy one demanded softer, held highlights, on the same base in the same city. Available at all only because Dynamic Range & Tone Curve, the contrast controls the tone curve moves in half steps.
• DR400, up from the faithful build's DR200. Mumbai's midday and its sea-haze glare need the headroom, and DR400 pins ISO at 500 or above, which is intended.
• Grain Weak/Small and Sharpness 0, both unchanged, on two arguments that happen to agree. The datasheet claims fine grain for a high-speed film and excellent sharpness, and large grain clumps on faces read as sensor noise rather than as film. Reggie's Superia runs Strong/Large and Sharpness −2 by design, chasing a vintage feel over emulsion accuracy. This build has no reason to follow it.
• Only −1 Blue, where Reggie's Superia runs −4. Negative Blue is a yellow push, and yellow onto olive is the documented route to sallow. This is the single value where the two recipes disagree most, and the disagreement is about undertone rather than about who is right.
• Clarity 0. House standard: no skin-texture penalty, HEIF-safe, and fast shot-to-shot saving.
• Expose +1/3 to +2/3, metering for the skin. The datasheet pairs high speed with wide exposure latitude, and DR400 is holding the highlights, so protect the face and let the top end look after itself.

The variant this recipe exists for: tube light

Superia carries a fourth cyan layer, added so the film renders correctly under fluorescent light where three-layer negatives go green. No other film in this bank was engineered for that light, and it happens to be the light Mumbai's shops, homes, stairwells, local trains and market interiors actually run on.

The X-T5 has no fourth layer, so the correction has to come from white balance. This bank normally uses the Fluorescent presets creatively rather than literally (CineStill 800T uses Fluorescent 3 for a cool night cast). Here the literal use is the right one, because the goal is neutral skin under tube light rather than a stylised cast.

Corrected 2026-08-09, and the correction came from the film's own bulletin. Fujifilm publishes a colour-compensating filter table by lamp type, and cool-white fluorescent is the one lamp that needs no filter and no exposure correction at all. Every other lamp on the table needs something. Kodak's Ektar needs 30B and a full stop under the same tube. So the film does not fight cool-white light, it was built for it. This variant previously asked for +2 Red on top of the camera's own cool-white preset, on the reasoning that the tube and the base's shadow bias stack. That double-counts: Fluorescent 3 already neutralises the lamp, and what is left to correct is the base's cyan-green shadow bias, which the recipe already handles at +1 Red. The variant now matches the base, with +2 Red kept as the fallback if real frames say otherwise. Full evidence in the faithful build's research notes.

One consequence worth knowing before you shoot it. The blue-channel mechanism above is an outdoor mechanism. Tube-lit interiors contain almost no saturated blue, so Color Chrome FX Blue idles indoors and the recipe leans entirely on white balance and the tone curve there. That is why the fluorescent rows below move Red and nothing else.

Color Chrome FX Blue Strong is a deliberate, assertive setting here, so it is worth knowing why. The bank's X-Trans V & Recipe Conversion Notes conversion rule drops CCFXB one notch when porting a X-Trans IV recipe to the X-T5, because X-Trans V renders blue more strongly. That rule governs ports, and this recipe was designed natively on V, so it does not apply. It does mean Strong here is stronger than Strong on a IV body. Reggie's Superia reaches the same conclusion on the same base and the same sensor generation, which is the closest thing to corroboration available without frames. If skies read synthetic on your subjects, Weak is the fallback and the recipe still works. It just does more of its cooling through the white balance again.

Validation tier: Original design. Field-test pending. Grounded in the Fujifilm Superia X-Tra 400 datasheet (AF3-151E: fine grain, excellent sharpness, wide latitude, excellent grey balance, the fourth colour layer, excellent skin reproduction), Fujifilm's published design statements for Classic Negative, the complexion-density findings inherited from the Kodak sheets through AP's Portra and AP's UltraMax, the two real Superia scans already analysed for the faithful build, and the Mumbai 11-image place study, which is the direct evidence behind Highlight −1.5.

Two gaps stated plainly. It has not been shot on Indian skin, which is the premise of the whole AP set. And it has not been shot under a tube light, which is this recipe's specific claim to a place in the bank. The fluorescent rows are reasoning from the datasheet and the base's documented bias, with no frame behind them yet.

Scope, so nobody is disappointed for the wrong reason: this is tuned for warm and olive complexions in strong or hazy Indian light. On pale skin in flat northern light the +1 Red shift will read warm, and the faithful build is the better choice there.

Test priority: in order

1. A face under a cool-white tube light. The recipe's reason to exist and its biggest risk in one frame. Does Fluorescent 3 with +1 Red hold the skin neutral, or does it still read green? If green survives, +2 Red is the next step. This is now the recipe's most evidenced claim and its least tested one.
2. A face in deep market shade. Shade is where Classic Negative's cyan-green shadow region does its worst work, because the whole frame sits in it. If Shadow −1 holds in open daylight but fails here, the honest answer is −1.5 rather than −2 everywhere.
3. Sky and skin in the same frame, in sun. The single test of the central idea. If the sky reads Superia-cool while the face reads warm, the relocation worked. If the face has gone cool along with the sky, Color Chrome FX Blue is reaching further than claimed and the mechanism needs rethinking rather than tuning.
4. Shadows at 100 per cent. DR400 with Shadow −1 means the lifted shadows come off a capture that was exposed two stops down, so shadow noise is the thing to inspect, per Dynamic Range & Tone Curve, the contrast controls dynamic-range-and-tone.
5. The same face on this and AP's UltraMax, back to back. Isolates the base decision from the skin tuning. Cool mid-tone recipe against warm accent recipe, same subject.

What would count as the recipe being wrong rather than needing a tweak: if skin only reads correctly once the white balance has been pushed past +3 Red, then the cyan-green shadow bias is too strong to correct from the white balance grid, and a Superia look for this skin belongs on Reala Ace with the Superia character rebuilt by hand, rather than on the base Fujifilm actually modelled on Superia. That would be a real finding, and it is worth knowing which way it falls.

Pro tip: The magenta highlight is the base, not your white balance (official). Fujifilm's stated signature for Classic Negative is cyan-green shadows and magenta highlights. So when highlights on this recipe read pink rather than warm, the fix is to reduce the Red shift, not to add Blue. Adding Blue cools the whole frame to hide a bias that lives at the top end only, and it takes Superia's skin rendering down with it. This is the one tuning rule worth memorising for every Classic Negative recipe in the bank.

Pro tip: Put richness where the skin is not. Three settings here do the same job through different doors: Color Chrome Effect adds depth inside saturated colour, Color Chrome FX Blue adds it to saturated blues, and Color is held at +2 because on this base it would land on the face. It generalises past this recipe. On any Classic Negative build, reach for the Chrome controls before the Color dial when people are in the frame.

Pro tip: This is the fastest-saving recipe in the AP set. Clarity 0 and Grain Weak mean no buffer penalty and full HEIF compatibility, so it is the AP recipe to load when the frame changes faster than you can think. AP's UltraMax is also Clarity 0, but its Strong grain costs more processing than this one's Weak.

ISO 500 is the sweet spot, not a compromise (measured 2026-07-27). DR400 pins the ISO floor at 500, and that is exactly where the X-T5's conversion-gain step sits, so it is the cleanest ISO in that region rather than a tax you pay for using DR400. ISO 640 is the expensive next click: roughly 0.35 EV of dynamic range for one third-stop, against about 0.02 EV for the step from 400 to 500. In good light, hold ISO at 500 and control exposure with aperture and shutter. Measured from published read-noise and PDR data, see Dynamic Range & Tone Curve, the contrast controls.

Original design (field-test pending). See the notes and the Knowledge base.

Part 1: Why this recipe was almost not built

The AP set had a gap and an objection sitting on top of it.

The gap: AP's UltraMax covers the warm street, AP's Portra covers the person, AP's Kodachrome covers the documentary picture of India. All three are built for light you can see by. None of them is built for a Mumbai interior, and a large share of the city's daily life happens under a tube light.

The objection: this bank's own analysis rules Classic Negative out. The base comparison in AP's Portra is blunt about it.

That verdict stands, and this recipe does not overturn it. What it does is take the verdict seriously enough to work out the mechanism, which turned out to be correctable in a way the earlier note assumed it was not.

Classic Negative is also not optional here. Fujifilm built the simulation from Superia. A Superia recipe on any other base is a colour grade wearing the name, so either the objection gets solved on this base or the recipe should not exist.

Part 2: What the datasheet says, and the one line nobody has used

Fujifilm's Superia X-Tra 400 bulletin (AF3-151E, mapped in full in the faithful build's research notes) claims fine grain for a high-speed film, excellent sharpness, wide exposure latitude, excellent grey balance from the brightest highlights to the deepest shadows, and excellent skin colour reproduction.

Then there is the fourth colour layer.

Superia carries a fourth, cyan-sensitive layer added so the film renders correctly under fluorescent light, where ordinary three-layer colour negatives go green. It is the film's genuine engineering distinction, it is the reason Superia became the default roll for indoor snapshots for a generation, and no recipe in this bank has ever used it as a design input. The faithful build records the fact and then builds a daylight recipe, which is reasonable, because the faithful build's job is the emulsion rather than a place.

Fujifilm's own filter table settles it beyond the marketing line. The bulletin lists a colour-compensating filter for every lamp type, and cool-white fluorescent is the only one that needs nothing: no filter, no exposure correction. Daylight fluorescent needs 10M+10Y, warm white needs 30C+30M, clear mercury needs 40M+40Y. Kodak's Ektar needs 30B and a full stop under that same cool-white tube.

That is the fourth layer quantified, from the manufacturer, and it is the hardest evidence this recipe has. It also corrected the recipe: the tube-light variant used to ask for +2 Red on top of the camera's cool-white preset, which double-counts a lamp the film barely needs correcting for. It now matches the base at +1 Red.

For this brief it is the most useful page in the bulletin. Mumbai's shops, homes, stairwells, local trains and market interiors run on tube light. The one film engineered for that light is also the film this recipe emulates. That is the recipe's reason to exist, and it is why the fluorescent variant in the notes is the headline rather than a footnote.

The honest limit: the X-T5 has no fourth layer. The correction has to come from the white balance grid, which is a blunter instrument than an extra emulsion layer, and it corrects the light without reproducing what the layer did to hue separation. The variant is a translation of the film's intent, not a reproduction of its chemistry.

Part 3: The chromatic problem, which is not the tonal one

The other two AP recipes solve a tonal problem. Classic Chrome's shadow end is hard, darker skin sits lower on the curve, hardness there costs facial modelling, and the fix is to lift the shadow.

Classic Negative's problem has the same shape and a different cause. Fujifilm's stated signature is that colours are "biased toward cyan-green in the shadows and magenta in the highlights" (Fujifilm Official Design Notes, from the X Stories / product pages official design notes). The shadow region is tinted, so anything sitting in it inherits a green cast regardless of how much detail survives.

Stack the three facts:

1. Darker skin renders at roughly half the separation from mid-grey that lighter skin does, about +0.16 against +0.31 in Kodak's complexion-density tables. So the face sits low.
2. The base tints that region cyan-green.
3. Maharashtra skin skews warm with olive common, and olive is yellow plus green.

Add a tube light, which casts green, and the same hue is arriving from four directions at once. This is a better explanation of the "Classic Negative makes Indian skin look tired" complaint than the usual one, which blames saturation.

The correction follows from the mechanism rather than from taste. Shadow −1 raises the face out of the tinted region. White balance +1 Red opposes the remaining cast directly, since red sits opposite cyan on that axis. And crucially, moving the face up puts it in the mid-tones, which is where Fujifilm says this base is deliberately at its most colourful: "colorful even in the midtones." So the fix does not trade colour away to buy neutrality. It moves the skin into the zone the base treats best.

Where the cool went

Removing Superia's cool white balance leaves a debt. The stock's coolness is its signature, and a build that takes it out without putting it back somewhere is a warm consumer-negative recipe wearing a Fuji name.

The resolution is that Superia's cool is a blue-highlight phenomenon rather than a global chill. The datasheet claims excellent skin reproduction, so the film does not make people green. The cool lives in neutrals, skies and highlights. That means it can be carried by a control that acts selectively on saturated blues instead of by one that acts on everything.

Skin is not a saturated blue, so the control does not reach it. This is the same mechanism the whole AP set runs on, stated at the level of a single setting: put the effect where the skin is not.

Two honest qualifications. The bank's X-Trans V & Recipe Conversion Notes conversion rule drops Color Chrome FX Blue one notch when porting a X-Trans IV recipe to the X-T5, because X-Trans V renders blue more strongly. That rule governs ports and this recipe was designed natively on V, so it does not bind here, but it does mean Strong on this body is stronger than Strong on a IV body. Reggie's Superia reaches the same conclusion on the same base and sensor generation, which is as close to corroboration as this gets without frames. And the mechanism is an outdoor one: tube-lit interiors contain almost no saturated blue, so indoors the control idles and the recipe leans on white balance and the tone curve alone.

Why the Red shift stops at +1

Everything above argues for more Red, and the highlight bias argues against it. The magenta lean at the top end belongs to the simulation, so Red added to fix the shadows also deepens a pink cast in the highlights that was never a white balance error. Fujifilm's own tuning implication, recorded in the Fujifilm Official Design Notes, from the X Stories / product pages design notes, is that pink highlights on this base call for less Red rather than more Blue.

+1 Red is where those two pressures balance. It is deliberately less than Mumbai's +3R, which is a street recipe with no obligation to protect a face, and the difference between the two is the clearest illustration in the bank of what "tuned for skin" actually changes.

Why the Blue shift stops at −1

This is where this recipe and Reggie's Superia disagree most, and it is worth being precise about, because Reggie's recipe is good and was built with care for exactly this class of problem.

Negative Blue is a yellow push. Reggie's runs −4. On skin with red-brown undertones, a yellow push adds warmth and richness and reads as depth. On golden-olive undertones, which already carry yellow and green, the same push adds the hue the skin has too much of, and the documented result is sallow. AP's UltraMax reached the same conclusion from the other direction and pulled the reference recipe's −5B back to −3B for the same reason.

So the two recipes are not competing answers to one question. They are correct answers to two different undertones, and neither generalises to the other.

Why depth was added with Color Chrome rather than Color

The obvious lever for a richer frame is Color, and on this base it is the wrong one. Fujifilm states that Classic Negative applies a mid-tone saturation emphasis, staying "colorful even in the midtones". Mid-tones are where skin lives, so raising Color here is a direct hit on complexion, and on warm skin it goes orange quickly.

Color Chrome Effect does the opposite job. It restores tonal depth inside already-saturated colour, which means foliage, painted walls, fabric and signage, and it has almost nothing to act on in low-saturation skin. Color stays at +2, matching a medium-saturation stock, and the richness arrives through a door skin is not standing in.

This is also why the recipe runs Strong where the faithful build runs Weak. The faithful build has no obligation to protect a face, so it can let Color and the base do the work between them. This one has capped Color for skin's sake and needs the depth from somewhere.

Part 4: The adjudication, and what it changed

This recipe was drafted twice, independently, in two different sessions working from the same repo. Both drafts are recorded here because the disagreement was more useful than either draft alone, and because the bank has a precedent for settling that kind of conflict on evidence rather than authorship.

The two drafts already agreed on 11 of 14 settings, including both of the values that carry the argument: WB +1R/−1B and Shadow −1. They also reached those two by the same route, from Fujifilm's cyan-green shadow statement and from the bank's own magenta-highlight tuning rule. Two independent derivations landing on the same load-bearing values from the same primary sources is the strongest corroboration available for a recipe with no frames behind it.

Three settings disagreed, and all three resolved against the first draft.

The first draft's reasoning for Highlight −1 was that it keeps the frame clear of the magenta-biased highlight region. That conflated two controls: the magenta bias is corrected on the Red axis, as the recipe's own tuning row now says, and the tone curve should be set from the light instead.

What survived from the first draft is the material the second one did not have: the fourth colour layer read as a design input, the tube-light variants that follow from it, the undertone comparison against Reggie's Superia, and the AP-set positioning below.

Part 5: How this sits against the closest prior art

The shared ground is worth stating: Reggie reached Shadow −1 independently, and it is the right direction for the same reason it is right here. That is the second time in this set that his instinct has landed on the correction darker skin needs, after the same value in Reggie's Portra. Credit where it is due. The derivation here is an argument for a value he had already found by eye.

The trade this recipe makes, stated plainly

Superia measures at gamma 0.69, the steepest colour negative in this bank and about 19 per cent above Portra 400 (measurement). This recipe then runs DR400 with Highlight −1.5 and Shadow −1, which is a deliberately flatter build than the film.

That is a real departure and it is worth naming rather than hiding. The faithful build keeps Superia's punch because its job is the emulsion. This one gives some of that punch away to lift skin out of Classic Negative's cyan-green shadow region and to survive Mumbai's midday. Anyone who wants the film's actual contrast should shoot the faithful build. Anyone who wants a face to hold up in that light should shoot this one. The interpretation is the point, and the cost is contrast.

Part 6: Position in the AP set

Four recipes, four different colour mechanisms, one city.

The fourth position is the one the set was missing. Mumbai's everyday frame is mostly mid-tones, a person against a painted wall in clothing that is neither loud nor grey, and Classic Negative is the only base here whose saturation emphasis is placed exactly there.

There is no the notes, which matches the rest of the AP set. Movie mode drops Grain, both Color Chrome controls and Clarity, and this recipe's identity sits in white balance and the tone curve, both of which survive the conversion. A video version is a short job if anyone wants it.

Validation status

Original design, field-test pending. Grounded in:

1. The Fujifilm Superia X-Tra 400 bulletin, AF3-151E. Fine grain, excellent sharpness, wide latitude, grey balance across the range, excellent skin reproduction, and the fourth colour layer.
2. Fujifilm's published design statements for Classic Negative. The cyan-green shadow and magenta highlight bias, the mid-tone saturation emphasis, and the consumer-negative design intent.
3. Kodak's complexion-density tables, inherited through AP's Portra and AP's UltraMax.
4. The two real Superia scans analysed for the faithful build, which confirmed the cool palette, muted olive greens and medium contrast.
5. The Mumbai 11-image place study.

Two gaps, stated plainly. It has not been shot on Indian skin, which is the premise of the whole AP set. And it has not been shot under a tube light, which is this recipe's specific claim to a place in the bank. The fluorescent variant is reasoning from the datasheet and the base's documented bias, with no frame behind it yet.An indoor scan with faces in it would be the single most valuable file this recipe could receive, and the bank has none.

The explicitly labelled inference, same as elsewhere in this set: mapping Kodak's negative-exposure density targets onto a digital tone curve is reasoning from the data rather than a manufacturer claim, and the tables come from Kodak films rather than from Superia's own sheet, which publishes no complexion densities. Where skin falls on a tone curve is a property of skin and the curve rather than of the stock, so the logic carries, but it is one step from the source and should be read that way.