Clay Season

Muted earth tones, the warm-moody grade that trade sources name as the 2026 counterpart to cold desaturation: browns, tans, terracotta and clay, desaturated but not drained, with warmth carried by hue rather than by saturation. Autumn light, adobe walls, linen, skin, dust, coffee. Original creative design, see the creative README. Rationale in the notes.

The restraint is the design. Current colour-grading commentary is explicit that heavy teal-and-orange and extreme shadow tints now date a video, and that understated grades age better. Clay Season is deliberately a low-amplitude look: it moves hue and holds saturation back.

Why

• Nostalgic Neg. Is the only Fujifilm base built around amber highlights and rich, weighty mid-tones: Fujifilm designed it after 1970s American New Color work. It delivers the earth palette in the base, so the recipe does not have to manufacture it with WB alone.
• Color −1 with WB +2R/−2B: the core move. Warmth comes from hue, saturation comes down. Pushing Color up would give a heavy amber-orange grade. Pulling it down leaves clay and tan.
• Highlight −1.5, Shadow −1: soft top, slightly open bottom, but not matte. Blacks still reach black, which is what separates this from Matte Editorial. The half-step on Highlight matters: −2 goes limp on this base, −1 keeps too much snap.
• Grain Weak/Small: 2026 commentary is consistent that a small amount of grain reads as "cinema" and softens digital cleanliness. Weak is enough here. The look is quiet.
• Clarity −1: one notch of softness in the mid-tones. (Non-zero Clarity slows shot-to-shot saving and is dropped in HEIF, shoot JPEG for the full look.)

Tuning

• More terracotta / Southwest: WB +3R/−3B, Color 0.
• Cooler, more "linen and stone": WB +1R/−1B, Color −2.
• Deeper and moodier: Shadow 0, Exposure −1/3.
• If skin goes too orange: the main failure mode on this base. Pull WB Red to +1 before touching Color.

Best in

Overcast and open shade, late afternoon, autumn, interiors with warm practicals, and anything with brick, wood, leather, sand or dry grass. Weakest in flat blue midday light, where there is no warmth for the base to work with.

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, not 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.

Movie-mode adaptation of the stills recipe. Movie mode drops Grain, Color Chrome Effect, Color Chrome FX Blue and Clarity (see Video / Movie Mode, settings, differences, and photo→video translation video-mode-settings), so this carries the colour and tone foundation across and compensates for the missing texture controls. Target: standard film-simulation recording (baked-in), not F-Log.

Set these in the movie shooting display → IMAGE QUALITY SETTING tab (stored separately from stills).

What was dropped, and how it is handled

• Color Chrome Effect (Weak): unavailable. Colour is deliberately NOT raised to compensate: unlike most video conversions in this bank. Clay Season's entire premise is warmth carried by hue with saturation held down, so lifting Color would invert the design. The small loss of depth is accepted.
• Clarity (−1): unavailable → Sharpness −2 recovers the mid-tone softness.
• Grain (Weak/Small): unavailable → add in post. Keep it light: grain here is a texture cue, not a look. See Post-Production Film Grain, deriving settings from datasheets post-grain-settings for Premiere and Resolve settings derived from datasheet measurements.
• Color Chrome FX Blue (Off): was already Off. Nothing lost.

Notes

• The strongest use of this look in motion is interiors with warm practicals: tungsten and LED bulbs give Nostalgic Neg. Exactly the amber it was designed around, and the flat tone curve holds the highlight on a bare bulb.
• Deliberately weak in flat blue midday light. There is no warmth for the base to act on.
• Shooting F-Log/F-Log2 instead? Treat this as a grade target, not a bake-in, the look is applied in the grade. The F-Log→Rec.709 LUTs are the starting point.

An original creative design, not a film emulation. Settings in the notes. Movie mode in the notes.

The look, and where it comes from

Muted earth tones: browns, tans, terracotta, clay, ochre. Warm in hue, restrained in saturation. Trade commentary on 2026 colour work names this as the warm counterpart to cold desaturation, and pairs it with a warning worth quoting: heavy teal-and-orange and extreme shadow tints now date a video, and understated grades age better.

That warning is the design constraint. Clay Season is deliberately low-amplitude. It moves hue and holds saturation back, which is the opposite of how most "warm" presets work.

Why Nostalgic Neg.

Fujifilm built Nostalgic Neg. Around 1970s American New Color photography. Amber highlights over rich, weighty mid-tones. It is the only base in the camera that delivers the earth palette natively.

That matters practically: a warm grade built on a neutral base has to manufacture the warmth with White Balance alone, which pushes the whole frame amber including things that should stay neutral. Starting from a base that is already earth-toned means the WB shift can stay small (+2R/−2B) and the neutrals survive.

The three settings that define it

Color −1 against WB +2R/−2B. The core move, and it looks contradictory until you shoot it: warmth is added on the hue axis and removed on the saturation axis at the same time. Raise Color instead and you get a heavy amber grade that reads as a filter. Lower it, and what is left is clay and tan. Colour that is clearly warm but never loud.

Highlight −1.5. A half step, and it is doing real work. On this base −2 goes limp, the amber highlight rolls off so far it turns milky, while −1 keeps too much snap for a muted look. −1.5 is the position between them, available only because the Dynamic Range & Tone Curve, the contrast controls tone curve moves in half steps.

Shadow −1, not lower. One notch open. This is what separates Clay Season from Matte Editorial, which lifts shadows to −2 so nothing reaches black. Here blacks still reach black. The look is muted, not faded, and that distinction is the whole difference between the two recipes.

Why it sits apart from its neighbours

Honest limits

• Original design, not an emulation. It targets no film stock, so there is nothing to validate it against, the bank's "Original design" tier, the same as the other creative looks. Its test is whether it looks good, and that needs your frames in the test frames.
• The main failure mode is orange skin. Nostalgic Neg. Plus a red shift can tip faces. Pull WB Red to +1 before touching Color.
• Needs warmth in the scene. In flat blue midday light there is nothing for the base to work with, and the recipe reads as a slightly dull neutral.
• Clarity −1 costs you HEIF and shot-to-shot speed. Shoot JPEG for the full look.

Last updated: 2026-07-27