darktable preset inspired by FujifilmPro 400H

What the style changes

The style adds five darktable modules. It aims at a light, soft and slightly cool Pro 400H: cyan-leaning greens, skin cooler than Portra’s, blues left deep and fine grain. The sources are detailed on the Fujifilm Pro 400H film page. All figures below come from renders made with darktable-cli 5.6.0 at 1000 px, measured in CIELab.

• Soft and light. The tone curve raises the blacks and brightens the midtones and highlights, with no marked shoulder. The image gets lighter (L 53.2 → 56.3, brightest 5 % from 75.2 to 78.6) and the darkest 5 % rise from L 2.6 to 4.7, while contrast barely moves (Lsd 14.3 → 15.0).
• Greens toward cyan. rgb primaries and color equalizer turn greens toward cyan and turquoises toward green, for the “mint” rendering described by reviews. A patch of foliage moves from 115° to 137°, while the Portra 400 style and t3mujinpack pull it toward yellow (about 103 to 106°). Turquoise shorts move from 233.5° to 227°.
• Cooler, pinker skin. Skin hue moves from 44.2° to 38.8°, against 48.3° with the Portra 400 style, and its chroma drops by 10 %.
• Deep blues, fewer oranges. Sky and sea stay close to the base (chroma −5 % and +3 %), where the Portra 400 style and t3mujinpack desaturate them by 18 to 25 %. An orange vest loses 19 % chroma: reviews contrast 400H’s depth in blue and green with the warm oranges and reds of Kodak films.
• A neutral to slightly cool gray. A gray T-shirt goes from b* −3.3 to −4.0; the Portra 400 style warms it to +1.6.
• Fine grain, identical to the Portra 400 style: Fujifilm’s RMS of 4 and the reviews do not agree on how the two films compare.

On skin, t3mujinpack goes the other way: it saturates skin by 45 % and warms it to 48°. This style follows the reviews, which describe skin cooler than Portra’s.

What it leaves alone

• Your base development. The style contains no exposure, no sigmoid or filmic, no white balance, no color calibration and no LUT: those stay as you set them.
• Your pipeline order. The style file carries no module order list, so it does not impose one on your image.
• Your own color balance rgb. The style’s instance is named “film”, so it is added next to yours without changing it (unless the photo already has an instance named “film”, for example from an earlier application of the style).

What it does not leave alone: applied from the lighttable or the darkroom, each module of the style replaces the instance of the same name on the photo, or is added if there is none. The style’s unnamed modules, rgb primaries, color equalizer, tone curve and grain, therefore overwrite any settings you had already made in those modules. Your earlier settings stay in the history stack. Exporting with a style, or rendering with darktable-cli as our measurements do, adds the style’s modules as separate instances instead. Details in Install and apply darktable styles.

Limits

• An interpretation, not a calibration. No film was scanned or measured to tune the style, and the film is no longer made: the reviews cover different batches, labs and scanners.
• The overexposed, pastel look of wedding photography is not reproduced. It comes from the film’s response to extra light and from the scanner.
• Greens were measured on a small, dark and dull patch (chroma about 6): the test photos have almost no vegetation. The effect still needs checking on a landscape.
• Conflicting sources on contrast, saturation and grain. The style chooses soft contrast, moderate saturation and the same grain as the Portra 400 style.
• The fourth layer is not simulated as such. Only its described consequences, cooler greens and turquoises toward mint, are translated, by hue rotations.

Tips

• For the pastel look, overexpose slightly with the exposure module.
• Everything stays editable. The style’s modules are ordinary modules in your history: you can adjust or switch off each of them afterwards, for example the “film” color balance rgb.
• Installation: see Install and apply darktable styles.