Fujicolor Superia X-Tra 400

Research-backed original recipe grounded in the Fujifilm Superia X-Tra 400 datasheet + multiple film reviews (see the notes). Reproduces the classic cool, green-leaning "Fuji look" consumer-negative: medium contrast/saturation, fine grain, sharp, with Superia's signature cool blue highlights and slight green-magenta cast. Grade rationale in the notes.

Why these values (short)

• Classic Negative: Fujifilm explicitly modeled this film sim on Superia. It's the single most faithful base (cool teal shadows, hue separation, Fuji-consumer character).
• Daylight −1R/+1B: a whisper cool for Superia's blue highlights and green-magenta lean, without wrecking the "smooth, beautiful and naturally depicted skin tones" the bulletin claims. Fujifilm locates that cast precisely: its printer-conditions note warns of "a slight blue cast" in the overexposed areas, so the lean belongs at the top end rather than across the frame.
• DR200, Highlight −1, Shadow +1: a punchy build for a punchy film. Measured from Fujifilm's own curve, Superia runs γ 0.69, the steepest colour negative in this bank and about 19 per cent above Portra 400. The old note here called it "medium contrast", which came from reviews comparing it with other consumer films rather than from the curve. See the notes.
• Color +2, CCE Weak: the bulletin's colour claims are about hue fidelity rather than intensity, naming "violets and several greens with enhanced fidelity" alongside "vibrant and dynamic reds, blues, and yellows". That is what a fourth sensitised colour layer buys, and it is consistent with reviewers reading the film as medium-saturation. The recipe matches separation, not loudness.
• CCFXB Weak: deepens the cool blues Superia is known for.
• Grain Weak/Small, Sharpness 0: now on numbers rather than adjectives. Diffuse RMS granularity 4 at a 48 µm aperture, and resolving power 125 lines/mm at 1000:1 chart contrast. Genuinely fine and genuinely sharp, so neither is softened.
• Clarity 0: per quality standard.

Handling

• Best outdoors in daylight: Superia's fine grain and cool character shine. Grain rises indoors (bump Grain to Strong, Small for a grittier indoor/low-light Superia).
• Wide latitude. Box speed to +1/3 over is clean. It tolerates more.
• The Superia family: this targets X-Tra 400 (the iconic one). Superia 100/200 are finer-grained and a touch warmer. Superia 1600 is grainier/moodier. Variants to derive later.

Handling, from the bulletin

• Long exposures are free to 2 seconds: no compensation from 1/4000 to 2 s, then +1/3 at 4 s, +2/3 at 16 s, +1 at 64 s.
• Under tungsten the film drops to ISO 100 with a 80A, so the native rendering is a daylight one.
• Under cool-white fluorescent the real film needs no filter and no exposure correction, the only lamp on Fujifilm's table that needs nothing. That is the fourth colour layer doing its job, and it is the whole reason AP's Superia exists as a tube-light recipe.

Movie-mode version 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). The cool Superia colour/tone foundation transfers, richness is compensated. Target: standard film-simulation recording, not F-Log/HLG.

Set in the movie shooting display → IMAGE QUALITY SETTING tab.

Dropped → handled

• CCFXB Weak / CCE Weak: gone → Color +3 restores cool-blue and green richness.
• Grain (Weak/Small): gone → add fine grain in post if wanted (Superia grain is subtle anyway).
• Clarity: was 0 already. Nothing lost.

Original (research-backed).

The film

Fujifilm's iconic consumer colour negative, the green-boxed Superia X-Tra 400 that defined "the Fuji look" for a generation of point-and-shoot and travel photography. Where Kodak Gold is warm, Superia is cool: green/magenta-leaning, with bright cool blue highlights, medium saturation, high contrast for a negative, fine grain, and famously good skin. Daylight-balanced, wide latitude, discontinued 2024.

The grade in one line

A cool, green-leaning, medium-contrast consumer-negative with clean fine grain, sharp detail, and natural skin, the everyday "Fuji look" opposite of warm Kodak Gold.

How the settings build it

Reading the signature

• Cast: cool, green/magenta, the defining contrast with Kodak Gold's amber.
• Contrast: high for a colour negative. Measured γ 0.69, above Portra 400 and Ektar. Controlled cool highlights over deep shadows.
• Saturation: medium. Greens and cool blues lead, skin stays natural.
• Texture: clean and sharp. Superia's fine grain, not a gritty stock (bump grain for indoor/low-light).

The Kodak Gold ↔ Fuji Superia pairing

These two are the archetypal warm-vs-cool consumer negatives, and make a great pair in the bank:

• Kodak Gold 200. Warm, amber, Classic Chrome.
• Superia X-Tra 400 (this). Cool, green, Classic Negative. Same "everyday snapshot" role, opposite colour temperament.

Relationship to Reggie's Superia

Important nuance: don't assume Reggie's Superia behaves like his versatile, adaptive Reggie's Portra just because they share an author and a Auto-WB convention, the two have opposite philosophies. Portra is built to be gentle and forgiving across lighting. Superia is built to be heavy-handed and moody on purpose. This is the same emulsion-faithful vs artifact/purpose-faithful tension as the Portra comparison. This original answers "what does Superia actually look like," Reggie's Superia answers "how do I get a moody, vintage-feeling, skin-flattering portrait out of Classic Negative." If you shoot mostly people (especially deeper skin tones) and want mood over accuracy, Reggie's is worth trying instead of this one. For documentation/street/landscape fidelity, stay with this original.

Related

• Same Classic Negative base, different intents: Pacific Blues (stylised cool coastal), Reala Ace (neutral true-to-life), Mumbai Monsoon (moody rain), Reggie's Superia (portrait interpretation). Compare to see how the Superia-derived base is steered.

Evidence base for the notes. Primary source is Fujifilm's own product information bulletin. The curve work follows the method and the limits in Measuring film curves from datasheets, method, calibration, and its limits. Reference images analysed only, not redistributed.

1. Superia is the most contrasty colour negative in this bank

Measured from the characteristic curves in Fujifilm's bulletin, traced by hue and calibrated from the plot's own grid:

Stable across five fit windows (0.663 to 0.695). The calibration was checked by predicting the density endpoints from the plot by eye before tracing, and they match: B 0.72 to 2.96, G 0.40 to 2.59, R 0.13 to 2.12.

This corrects the description this bank used to carry. Both this page's earlier version and the notes called Superia a "medium contrast" film, sourced from reviews. Measured against Kodak's professional negatives it is the opposite: roughly 19 per cent steeper than Portra 400 and 23 per cent steeper than Ektar, sitting at the top of Kodak's published 0.45 to 0.7 range for colour negative.

The direction is independently plausible. Consumer film is built to print with punch straight from a minilab. A professional portrait negative is built flat to leave room for grading. "Medium" was always a comparison against other consumer films, and it quietly became a comparison against everything.

The comparison crosses two tracers (Fujifilm's plots need hue separation, Kodak's do not), so the error-cancelling argument that supports the Ektar-versus-Portra ratio does not apply here. Both tracers are calibrated, but no single object has been measured by both. Recorded in Measuring film curves from datasheets, method, calibration, and its limits.

2. The fourth colour layer, from the source

The bank has cited Superia's fourth layer from secondary sources. The bulletin states it directly in the opening line: the film "incorporates 4th Color Layer and the newly developed Super Fine-Σ (Sigma) Grain Technology". The spectral-sensitivity plot then draws four sensitised layers by name: Blue, Green, Cyan, Red, with the cyan layer dashed to distinguish it.

What Fujifilm claims the layer buys, in its own features table:

Read carefully, the colour claims are about hue fidelity rather than global saturation: named hues (violets, greens) rendering more faithfully, and particular hues reading stronger. That is what a fourth sensitised layer does, and it is consistent with reviewers calling the film medium-saturation. So Color +2 stands, and the reason improves: the recipe is not damping a vivid film, it is matching a film whose colour advantage is separation rather than intensity.

The fluorescent table, which is the strongest evidence in the bulletin

Fujifilm's recommended colour-compensating filters, by lamp:

Under cool-white fluorescent, Superia needs no filter and no exposure correction at all. It is the only lamp on the table that needs nothing, and the contrast with Kodak is stark: Ektar's sheet asks for 30B and a full stop under the same lamp.

That single row is the hardest evidence in this bank for why AP's Superia exists. Cool-white tube light is what Indian shops, homes, stairwells and local trains run on, and Superia is the one film here engineered to need nothing under it.

It also corrects that recipe's fluorescent variant, which asked for +2 Red on top of the camera's Fluorescent 3 preset. If the film itself needs no magenta correction under this lamp, the camera's own cool-white preset plus the base correction is the right starting point, not preset-plus-two. See that recipe's variant table.

3. Other primary-source facts the recipe now uses

• Diffuse RMS granularity 4, measured at a 48 µm aperture, density 1.0 above D-min. Very fine for a ISO 400 film, and it is the same measurement geometry this bank uses in Post-Production Film Grain, deriving settings from datasheets. This is what Grain Weak/Small encodes, and it is now a number rather than the adjective "fine grain".
• Resolving power 50 lines/mm at 1.6:1 chart contrast, 125 lines/mm at 1000:1. The basis for Sharpness 0 rather than negative: the film is genuinely sharp, so nothing needs softening.
• A documented blue cast in the highlights. The printer-conditions section warns that "depending on the printer type, a slight blue cast might appear in the overexposed areas". The recipe's cool white-balance lean was previously justified from reviews. This is Fujifilm saying the same thing about its own film, and it locates the cast specifically in the overexposed end rather than globally.
• Grey-card aim: 0.75 to 0.95 through the red filter, Status M, on a 18 per cent card. Comparable to Kodak's 0.77 to 0.87. Fujifilm publishes no complexion rows, so the skin reasoning in AP's Superia is correctly marked as inherited from the Kodak sheets rather than from this one.
• Long exposures are free to 2 seconds: no compensation from 1/4000 to 2 s, then +1/3 at 4 s, +2/3 at 16 s, +1 at 64 s.
• Tungsten drops the film to ISO 100 with a LBB-12 or Wratten 80A, so the native look is a daylight look.
• Super Fine-Σ grain technology uses crystals "approximately half the thickness" of the hexagonal crystals in the previous Superia X-Tra 400, for higher sensitivity and smoother grain at the same speed.

4. Corroborating reviews

Consensus across The Darkroom, Analog.Cafe, Alex Luyckx, Digital Camera World and Wikipedia: the classic "Fuji look", cool tones, green and magenta lean, cooler than Kodak, with a focus on blue highlights. Medium saturation. Fine grain when well exposed, grain rising indoors. Wide dynamic range. Discontinued April 2024 in all markets.

Where reviews and the bulletin disagree, the bulletin wins: reviews call the contrast medium, and the curve says it is the steepest colour negative measured here.

5. Evidence to settings

6. Validation status

• Datasheet-validated AF3-151E archived and mined: RMS, resolving power, filter tables, grey-card aim, reciprocity, the fourth layer named and plotted.
• Curve measured γ 0.69, five windows, endpoints validated against a blind read of the plot.
• Characteristic five independent reviews agree on cast, grain and latitude.
• Scan-validated 2 real scans (alpine landscapes, overcast, one photographer, one roll). Still missing: sunny, indoor, and skin.

The single most valuable addition to the reference set remains an indoor frame with faces, because the fluorescent claim above is the film's distinguishing feature and this bank has no pixel evidence of it.

7. Sources

• Fujifilm Product Information Bulletin AF3-151E, FUJICOLOR SUPERIA X-TRA 400 [CH] (archived, locally).
• Measuring film curves from datasheets, method, calibration, and its limits for the tracing method and its limits.
• The Darkroom, Analog.Cafe, Alex Luyckx, Wikipedia.