Artist series: Fujifilm recipes derived from paintings
Every other recipe in this bank starts from a film datasheet. These start from paintings: a corpus of reproductions per painter, measured for tone, chroma and hue distribution, then translated into in-camera settings the same way a film curve is.
The series
- Open Air: built on Monet
- Chrome Yellow: built on Van Gogh
- Raking Light: built on Caravaggio
- Divided Light: built on Signac
- Salon Light: built on Sargent
One measurement orders them: how much yellowness a painter's darks carry against his lights. Divided Light and Raking Light sit at its two ends, as far apart as any two of the bank's designed looks, and Signac is the only painter measured whose shadows run cool. Divided Light and Open Air are the closest pair in the whole bank on purpose: the same base and the same tone curve with opposite white balance, because Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism agree that a picture has no black in it and disagree about what colour a shadow is.
The recipes
Chrome Yellow
An original design for the high-chroma yellow-through-green register: the most saturated corpus measured in this bank, built on a palette that runs…
Original designArtist seriesVelvia
Divided Light
An original design for the Neo-Impressionist daylight look: the same lifted, no-black tone scale as Open Air with the shadows deliberately cooled, violet…
Original designArtist seriesAstia
Open Air
An original design for the Impressionist daylight look: no black anywhere in the frame, shadows that carry colour instead of losing it, violet in the darks…
Original designArtist seriesAstia
Raking Light
An original design for hard tenebrism: one high source raking across the subject, flesh that runs hot where the light lands, and a ground that keeps no…
Original designArtist seriesClassic Chrome
Salon Light
An original design for the warm society portrait: a deep black under a bright white, skin and silk carrying the whole palette, and not one pixel of green…
Original designArtist seriesPRO Neg. Hi
Why a corpus, and not a painting
A single painter read alone cannot be trusted. Museum photography is colour-managed but not identical between institutions, and centuries of varnish sit between an old master's palette and the file you can download. Measure one painter and you learn as much about varnish as about the painter.
So the painters were measured together, with one instrument, and only the differences between them count. That is what makes a finding here a fact about the painter rather than about the photograph of them. Each recipe says which measurement decided which setting, and which rival base lost on which number.
A census that cannot measure a painter has to say so. Vermeer and Botticelli came back too thinly sampled to carry a row, seven and five usable reproductions after deduplication, and were excluded rather than estimated. Turner was discarded outright: his painted output on the open-access sources is swamped by the Tate's digitisation of his sketchbooks, and the medium filter could not separate them.
The rest of the bank
Every recipe published in full, each one traced back to the film, or the painter, it came from.