Kodak UltraMax 400

Research-backed original, re-derived from the Kodak E-7023 datasheet (archived, Feb 2016). The faithful UltraMax, the drugstore 400 as Kodak specified it, not as the print-shop memory of it goes. Full derivation, the recipe-vs-datasheet audit, and where this parts company with the popular recipe in the notes.

Not to be confused with two neighbours. AP's UltraMax is an interpretation retuned for Indian skin tones and the Mumbai palette. The attributed reference recipe is a good, popular, deliberately grittier print-look build. This one answers only one question: what does the emulsion actually do?

The design principle

UltraMax is a skin-tone film that got a reputation as a grit film.

Kodak's own copy is unambiguous: "Optimized color precision technology provides consistently bright, vibrant colors with accurate skin-tone reproduction for natural-looking people pictures," and the features table lists the benefit as "Great skin tones and superb color." The sheet also claims "excellent sharpness and fine grain for crisp, clear pictures", even when enlarged, on Advanced KODAK T-GRAIN Emulsion technology.

None of that is how UltraMax is usually rendered. The popular look is a punchy, gritty, crushed-shadow drugstore print, and that look is real. It is what a 4×6 minilab print of UltraMax looked like in 1998. But it is the print pipeline's contribution, not the emulsion's. This recipe backs that out and keeps only what E-7023 documents. The result is warmer-neutral, less crushed, and considerably less etched than you may expect.

Why these values

• Classic Chrome base. Kept for two reasons that are evidence, not habit. First, Kodak states UltraMax is "printing compatible with KODAK GOLD Films", the two are designed to print to the same paper channel, i.e. The same colour-balance target, and this bank's Gold 200 is its most scan-validated recipe (~35 frames, refined from evidence) and sits on Classic Chrome. Second, Classic Chrome's low saturation baseline means +Color lands on accents rather than flooding the frame, which is exactly what the one real UltraMax scan in the bank shows. Classic Negative was considered and rejected: see the notes.
• Grain Strong, Small, and this is a published number, not an impression. E-7023 gives a Print Grain Index of 46 at 4×6 from 35 mm. On Kodak's own scale, 25 is the threshold of visibility and four units is one just-noticeable difference. That puts UltraMax roughly five JNDs above visible and about two and a quarter JNDs grainier than Portra 400 (PGI 37): the grainiest colour film in this bank. So Strong roughness is straightforwardly earned. Small rather than Large because the emulsion is T-GRAIN (tabular crystals: flatter, more regular, finer-structured than conventional grain), and because Kodak calls the result "fine grain." Grain that is prominent but well-structured is the honest reading of PGI 46 on a T-grain emulsion.
• DR400, the film's entire sales pitch. Kodak sells UltraMax on "the flexibility you need to take consistently better pictures in more picture taking situations, better low-light picture quality with fewer underexposures," with the features table listing "Better underexposure protection" and "Better pictures under more conditions (inside, outside, bad light, fast action)." It also publishes a full fluorescent and high-intensity-discharge filter table, which almost no consumer film datasheet bothers with. Kodak genuinely expected this film to be used in bad mixed light. DR400 is the digital expression of that latitude.
• Highlight −1 / Shadow 0. Deliberately uncrushed. The popular recipe runs Highlight +1 / Shadow +1. That is print punch, and the datasheet does not support it. Kodak's stated failure mode for this film is underexposure, which is a shadow-end concern, and the one real scan in the bank shows "shadows in rock crevices hold detail with a warm lean" and highlights "close to blowing but do not clip harshly." Highlight −1 (with DR400 already carrying most of the protection, going to −2 as Gold 200 does would flatten a film Kodak calls "bright, vibrant") and Shadow 0: neutral, letting Classic Chrome's naturally firm shadow end supply consumer-negative depth without burying anything.
• Color +4, the one place the popular recipe is right, and there is pixel evidence. The bank's single real UltraMax scan (flat overcast, Pentax ME Super + 50/1.4, Cornwall) recorded that "the single saturated accent (an orange jacket) reads strong and clean without going neon, against an otherwise muted scene." That is precisely the behaviour +4 on a low-saturation base produces, and it matches Kodak's "consistently bright, vibrant colors." One notch above Gold 200's +3, which is right: Gold is warm nostalgia, UltraMax is vibrancy.
• CCE Weak, CCFXB Off. Matching Gold 200. Color Chrome Effect adds density inside already-saturated colour. At Weak it keeps the orange-jacket accents from going flat without pushing a consumer negative toward transparency richness. CCFXB Off because Classic Chrome has magenta deliberately removed from sky blues by design. Adding blue tonal range fights the base's intent (and this is already the X-Trans V value. See X-Trans V & Recipe Conversion Notes).
• WB Daylight +2R/−4B. Warm, but not as yellow as the popular build. The reference recipe runs −5 Blue, a heavy yellow push, and the bank's Gold 200 runs +3R/−5B, but Gold's datasheet sells nostalgia, and UltraMax's sells skin accuracy. Piling yellow onto a film Kodak designed for "natural-looking people pictures" works against its stated purpose. +2R/−4B keeps the unmistakable Kodak consumer warmth, weighted slightly more to red than yellow. Fixed Daylight rather than Auto for repeatability (bank rule). The Auto variant below exists for the mixed-light use the datasheet explicitly anticipates.
• Sharpness 0. The sheet does claim "excellent sharpness... Even when enlarged", so it does not go negative like Gold 200's −2. But it also does not go positive: at PGI 46, positive Sharpness amplifies the grainiest colour emulsion in the bank, and Fujifilm's own guidance is that Classic Chrome "needs less Clarity and Sharpness than you'd expect" because the base already did print-contrast work. 0 is the honest middle.
• Clarity 0. The popular recipe's +3 is the single largest contributor to its grittier-than-spec rendering, and the datasheet gives it no support at all, there is no micro-contrast, edge-contrast or acutance language in E-7023. Same standard applied here as to Delta 100 and XP2 Super. Bonus: HEIF-safe, and no shot-to-shot saving penalty.
• ISO 500-6400. DR400 sets the floor at 500 on the X-T5. The ceiling is high because low light is the film's stated territory, "highest effective speed of any consumer 400 offering." Kodak publishes no push data, which is not a limit but an audience fact: snapshooters used flash, not push processing.
• EC +1/3 to +2/3. Colour negative film prefers overexposure, and Kodak names underexposure as the failure mode this film was engineered against. Slightly generous exposure also sits the skin where the density table wants it (below).

The complexion-density table, and what it is for here

E-7023 publishes negative density targets for a correctly exposed frame, read through a red filter (Status M):

Kodak's own caveat is worth quoting because it is routinely ignored: "Because of the extreme range in skin color, use these values only as a guide. For best results, use a KODAK Gray Card."

In this recipe the table is a metering aid: expose so a grey card sits at normal, and skin lands where Kodak intended. The far more consequential reading of the same table, that darker skin sits much closer to mid-grey than lighter skin, i.e. Lower on the tone curve, right where Classic Chrome's documented hard shadow end bites. Is what drives AP's UltraMax to Shadow −1. That is an interpretation and lives there, not here. This recipe stays neutral by design.

Variants

Handling

• Overexpose slightly and let it ride. This is a negative film with documented underexposure protection. +1/3 to +2/3 is where it wants to live. Underexposure is the one thing Kodak engineered it against.
• Let the accents do the work. Color +4 on a low-saturation base pops single saturated objects out of a muted frame, a red door, an orange jacket, a market awning. Compose for one strong colour rather than expecting the whole frame to sing. That is UltraMax's actual behaviour, and the bank's one scan confirms it.
• Expect visible grain, and don't fight it with NR. PGI 46 is the grainiest colour film here. High ISO NR stays at −4 for the same reason it does everywhere in this bank: noise reduction smears the very texture the recipe is modelling.
• Where it sits: Gold 200 is the warmer, softer, slower, most-validated sibling and the two are print-compatible by Kodak's own statement. Shoot Gold when you want nostalgia, this when you want speed and pop. Superia 400 is the cool green-leaning Fuji answer at the same speed. Portra 400 is the professional opposite: restrained, fine-grained, latitude over punch.
• Video: transfers as Film Sim + WB + DR (manual) + Tone Curve + Color. Grain and Color Chrome Effect are unavailable in movie mode, and grain is a defining property here (PGI 46), so a video version will look meaningfully cleaner than the stills. Add grain in post. See Video / Movie Mode, settings, differences, and photo→video translation.

Test priority

1. A face in normal daylight. The datasheet's headline claim is skin-tone accuracy, and this recipe is built to restore it. Does WB +2R/−4B keep complexions natural, or does it still read yellow? This is the claim most worth checking.
2. A high-contrast sunny frame. The only real scan in the bank is flat overcast, so the tone curve is untested in strong light. Does Highlight −1 + DR400 hold, or does this want Gold 200's −2?
3. A frame with one strong saturated accent in an otherwise muted scene. Confirms (or refutes) that Color +4 pops accents without flooding, the behaviour the existing scan showed and this recipe is banking on.
4. A golden-hour frame, to check whether +2R/−4B plus warm light tips too far. If it does, the portrait variant's −3B is the fix.

Validation tier: Datasheet-validated + Scan (1 frame, inherited). Grounded in the archived Kodak E-7023 (Feb 2016): Print Grain Index 46, Advanced T-GRAIN emulsion, antenna dye sensitization, the "accurate skin-tone reproduction" and "bright, vibrant colors" design claims, the complexion-density table, Gold print-compatibility, the full fluorescent/HID correction tables, flash guide numbers, and long-exposure limits. Plus the bank's one real UltraMax scan (2026-07-21, flat overcast, confounder-check passed). Inherited from the reference recipe's analysis and applied here to Color and the shadow end.

What the scan does and does not cover. It is a single frame in flat overcast light, so it evidences the warm lean, the accent-pop behaviour and shadow retention, and evidences nothing about skin, strong sun, or golden hour.

Pro tip: Three UltraMax recipes, and they are not interchangeable (2026-07-25). This one models the emulsion (E-7023). The reference recipe models the drugstore print. Grittier, punchier, and honest about it. AP's UltraMax models the emulsion for Indian skin in Mumbai, moving the punch out of the tone curve and into colour. If a frame disappoints, work out which question you were actually asking before you change a value.

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.

Datasheet-derived original. Primary source: Kodak E-7023, February 2016 (Kodak Alaris). Archived locally at the datasheet archive, 4 pages, read in full. Secondary: the bank's one real UltraMax scan. Settings in the notes.

What the datasheet actually says

The complexion-density table

Kodak's caveat, which is part of the data and should never be dropped: "Because of the extreme range in skin color, use these values only as a guide. For best results, use a KODAK Gray Card (gray side)."

The central finding: PGI 46 is the number that settles the grain argument

The bank has argued about UltraMax's grain twice, the reference recipe runs Strong/Large + Clarity +3, a 2026-07-15 audit flagged that as grittier than the emulsion spec, and AP's UltraMax moved to Strong/Small. All of that was reasoning from the phrase "fine grain." The datasheet also gives a number, and it points the other way.

Print Grain Index 46, on Kodak's own uniform perceptual scale where 25 = threshold of visibility and 4 units = one just-noticeable difference:

So UltraMax is about 2¼ JNDs grainier than Portra 400 at the same box speed, and roughly five JNDs above the point where grain becomes visible at all. It is the grainiest colour emulsion in this bank by a clear margin. Strong roughness is not an aesthetic choice. It is what the number says.

But the size axis goes the other way. The emulsion is T-GRAIN. Kodak's tabular crystal technology, the same family this bank documents for Ilford's Delta films in the B&W README. Tabular crystals are flatter and more regular than conventional cubic grain, which is why Kodak can claim "fine grain" at PGI 46 without contradiction: the grain is prominent but well-structured, not clumpy. That is exactly the distinction the X-T5's Grain Effect encodes as Roughness × Size. Hence Strong, Small, and it is why the reference recipe's Large overstates it. Large models clumping, which is a conventional-grain behaviour this emulsion does not have.

(One methodological caution, stated because it matters: PGI and RMS granularity are different scales and cannot be compared, Kodak says so explicitly. So UltraMax's 46 cannot be ranked against Pro 400H's RMS 4 or Acros's RMS 7. The comparison above only works because Ektar, Portra and UltraMax are all Kodak stills films quoted on the same PGI scale at the same print size.)

The second finding: this is a skin-tone film

Read the datasheet cold, without the drugstore-print associations, and the design intent is startlingly explicit:

"...consistently bright, vibrant colors with accurate skin-tone reproduction for natural-looking people pictures." "Great skin tones and superb color."

Kodak said it twice, once in prose and once in the benefits table. UltraMax was engineered as a people film, a snapshot film whose job was faces at birthdays, weddings and holidays, in whatever light was available. The "better low-light picture quality with fewer underexposures" pitch and the exhaustive fluorescent/HID filter tables are all in service of that.

The popular rendering. Crushed shadows, heavy yellow WB, Clarity +3. Works against every one of those claims. It is not wrong as a look. It is a faithful model of a 1998 minilab 4×6 print, which had its own contrast curve, its own paper, and its own auto-correction. This recipe backs that pipeline out and keeps only the emulsion. The practical consequences are the WB (+2R/−4B rather than −5B, weighted toward red rather than yellow, because piling yellow on a skin-accuracy film defeats its purpose) and the tone curve (Highlight −1 / Shadow 0 rather than +1/+1).

Bases considered

Classic Chrome: chosen

Two pieces of evidence, not habit:

1. Kodak states UltraMax is "printing compatible with KODAK GOLD Films." Print compatibility means the two emulsions are designed to land in the same place on the same paper, the same colour-balance target. This bank's Gold 200 is its most scan-validated recipe (~35 frames across all light conditions, WB and Clarity refined from evidence), and it sits on Classic Chrome. Building UltraMax on a different base would discard the strongest colour-balance evidence the bank owns for a Kodak consumer negative.
2. Classic Chrome's low saturation baseline makes +Color land on accents. This is the behaviour the one real UltraMax scan documents (below), and it is the film's actual character, a muted frame with one thing in it that pops, not an uniformly saturated picture.

Classic Negative: rejected

Structurally it looks like the better match: it is Fujifilm's consumer colour negative simulation, modelled on Superia, where Classic Chrome is modelled on no film at all (Fujifilm calls it "an imaginary film" based on printed magazine pages, see Fujifilm Official Design Notes, from the X Stories / product pages official design notes). Rejected for two reasons:

• Classic Negative carries a documented cyan-green shadow / magenta highlight signature. That is a Fujifilm consumer-negative fingerprint, and stamping it onto a Kodak emulsion imports the wrong manufacturer's colour philosophy. On skin specifically it doubles the sallow and ruddy risks, the same reasoning that rejected it for AP's UltraMax.
• The bank already has Superia 400 as the cool green-leaning 400-speed consumer negative. Putting UltraMax on the Superia-derived base would collapse a genuine Kodak-vs-Fuji distinction the bank exists to preserve.

Nostalgic Neg. / Pro Neg. Std: not seriously considered

Nostalgic Neg's amber highlights are a 1970s American-print look, further from the emulsion than Classic Chrome is. Pro Neg. Std is a studio portrait profile with soft gradations, the opposite of a punchy consumer film.

Recipe-vs-datasheet audit: this build against the other two

Two honest notes on that table. First, the reference recipe is right about Color +4 and this build follows it, that value has pixel evidence behind it, and copying an evidence-backed value is not the same as copying a recipe. Second, the reference recipe's deviations are not errors. They are a different target (the minilab print), correctly identified as such in the 2026-07-15 validation audit and preserved as a variant here.

What the one real scan actually establishes

The bank holds a single confounder-checked UltraMax frame (Wikimedia Commons, analysis-only. Pentax ME Super + SMC Pentax 50 mm f/1.4, Porthtowan Beach, Cornwall, flat overcast daylight, 35 mm, no styling). Recorded 2026-07-21 against the reference recipe. The findings apply to the emulsion, so they carry here.

What it evidences:

• Warm lean overall: sand and cliff as warm buff/pinkish-tan, with a slight magenta lean in bright sand. Supports a warm WB. The magenta lean is why this recipe weights toward red rather than piling on yellow.
• Accent behaviour: "the single saturated accent (an orange jacket) reads strong and clean without going neon, against an otherwise muted scene." This is the direct evidence for Color +4 on a low-saturation base.
• Shadows hold detail in rock crevices, with a warm lean → supports Shadow 0, contradicts +1.
• Highlights close to blowing but not clipping harshly → supports Highlight −1 + DR400 rather than a harder curve.
• Greens muted and yellow-olive. Grain visible and moderate, appropriate to a 400-speed consumer stock.

What it does not evidence, and must not be claimed to: it is one frame in flat overcast light. It says nothing about skin, the film's headline claim. Nothing about strong sun, and nothing about golden hour. Those are exactly the test-priority items in the notes. (A second candidate frame, a São Paulo interior, was examined and rejected as lit entirely by a TV screen, recorded as seen-and-rejected in the scan index.)

Where this sits in the bank

Gold and UltraMax are Kodak's own stated print-compatible pair, the same colour target at two speeds. Shoot Gold for nostalgia and softness, UltraMax for speed and pop. Portra is the professional opposite of UltraMax at the same box speed: the two bracket the entire C-41 400 category.

Validation status

Datasheet-validated + Scan (1 frame, flat overcast, inherited). Every setting traces to E-7023 or to the scan analysis, and the two places this recipe deviates from the popular build (grain size, tone curve) are argued against specific datasheet language above rather than asserted.

The gap is skin. The film's headline claim is skin-tone accuracy, this recipe is built to restore it, and there is no skin evidence at all, for this or for any colour recipe in the bank, which Validation Methodology. Proof of Faithfulness already names as the bank's largest structural gap. A colour portrait scan on UltraMax would be one of the two highest-value contributions anyone could make to this project.

Derived: 2026-07-25