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Summer Sauce: A Warm Classic Chrome Recipe for Fujifilm

Honey light, teal shadows. My Fujifilm recipe for hard summer sun, every setting explained, with frames straight out of camera.

Classic Chrome is the simulation a lot of us fall for first. Muted colour, deep shadows, grey weather that looks deliberate

But in hard summer sun, that same hardness works against you. Black shadows, brittle highlights, a white wall at noon that looks like an overexposed document.

Summer Sauce is my answer to that. It keeps the Classic Chrome palette, takes out most of its contrast and lays a warm shift on top. Warm light turns honey, skies and water lean teal.

In one line: Classic Chrome with the documentary hardness taken out.

Every photo here is a JPEG straight out of my Fujifilm X-H2S. No editing, no Lightroom, no cropping. Shot in Lofoten, mainland Norway, on the Isle of Skye, on the Scottish coast and in the Austrian Alps.

The recipe

  • Film Simulation: Classic Chrome
  • Dynamic Range: DR400
  • Grain Effect: Weak, Large
  • Color Chrome Effect: Strong
  • Color Chrome FX Blue: Strong
  • White Balance: Auto, +3 Red & −6 Blue
  • Highlight: −2
  • Shadow: −2
  • Color: +4
  • Sharpness: −1
  • High ISO NR: −4
  • Clarity: −5
  • ISO: Auto
  • Exposure Comp.: 0 to +1

Save it to one of the custom slots (C1 to C7). It takes about a minute to type in, and from then on the camera hands you a finished JPEG.

What each setting does

A recipe is easier to trust when you know why every value is there. So here it is from the bottom up.

The base: Classic Chrome

Classic Chrome pairs medium high contrast with low saturation. Nothing else in the menu does that.

Earthy, muted colours, shadows that keep their detail. No saturation slider builds that, because the restraint sits in the colour science. Everything else in this recipe is built on top of it.

The curve: Highlight −2, Shadow −2, DR400

Highlight −2 pulls the top of the curve down, so backlight rolls off softly instead of clipping.

Shadow −2 flattens the bottom, so a mountain in the shade keeps its texture instead of turning black.

DR400 protects bright skies on top of that. One catch: it needs four times the base ISO, which means ISO 640 or higher on the X-H2S.

The warmth: White Balance +3 Red, −6 Blue

This is where the honey comes from.

White balance stays on Auto, and the shift of 3 steps to Red and 6 steps away from Blue lays warmth over the muted palette. Because it sits on top of Auto, it follows the light instead of forcing one colour temperature onto every scene.

Color +4

Classic Chrome holds saturation back, and Color +4 gives exactly that back.

The red house stays red, but it never gets loud.

Color Chrome Effect: Strong

Adds depth to strong, saturated colours. The golden grass and the brown coats keep their gradation instead of melting into one flat orange.

Color Chrome FX Blue: Strong

Deepens the blues. Water and sky go teal, the cool half of the look and the counterweight to the warm white balance.

Without it, Summer Sauce would just be warm. With it, it has two temperatures in one frame.

The texture: Clarity −5, Sharpness −1, Grain, High ISO NR −4

Less micro contrast and softer edges, so skin looks like film and not like a sensor. Grain Weak, Large adds a fine texture, and High ISO NR −4 keeps fine detail from getting smeared.

The trade off: with Clarity on, the camera takes a moment longer to save each shot. In a fast burst you feel it. For landscapes and travel you won't.

Where it works, and where it doesn't

Made for hard summer sun, white walls, beaches and high contrast scenes that need absorbing. The harder the light, the better it looks.

That is also its weak spot. In fog and flat overcast, a flat curve on flat light turns to mud. On days like that, a recipe with more contrast does the job better. That's why Summer Sauce Contrast exists.

Quick start

  • Put it on a custom slot and leave ISO on Auto, so DR400 always works
  • Start at 0 exposure comp, go up to +1 for darker scenes or a lighter, airier look
  • Use it when the sun is hard. Switch recipes when the sky goes flat
  • Works on every X-Trans V body and on the X-Pro3, X-T4, X100V, X-S10, X-E4 and X-T30 II. The X-T3 and X-T30 miss Clarity, grain size and FX Blue, so treat it as a direction there

Thanks for reading

If you try Summer Sauce, I'd love to see what it does with your summer. Tag me on Instagram at @danieljschwarz, that's also where I post new recipes first.

Summer Sauce is one of the two recipes in My small Fuji Cookbook, a free PDF. The full book with twelve recipes is in my shop.