For a complete look, film needs to be printed – on cinema print film or on paper. The pills are the print stocks, colored by maker; Off shows the negative alone.
Standard is a fixed, neutral S-curve that gives a Normalized RAW its contrast back.
Cinema is the projected look. K2383 is Kodak’s theatrical stock and the standard since 1998; K2383W is the same stock held strictly to reference, with less teal-and-warm split; K2393 is the Premier print. F3513, F3510 and F3523 are Fuji’s, with cooler, greener shadows – 3510 never crosses over at all.
Vintage cinema is the release print of earlier decades: the bright, pale 5381 of the fifties, the soft 5382, the eighties’ 5384, the brown-black EXR 5386 of the nineties, and TECH, Technicolor dye transfer, with saturated color that prints dark like ink.
Paper is the darkroom print: Kodak Endura Premier (EP1), the Portra paper (PE1) and Fuji Crystal Archive (CA2), which is softer with a higher black. All three hold highlights close to a tinted paper white.
Instant – INSTAX, 600, SX-70 and FP-100C – is each instant film’s own print.
SP3000 isn’t a print but a scanner, the Fuji Frontier most labs run. Its rendering is what most people know as the film look: softer highlights than print film, and a scan’s black.
Exposure is the printer light, twelve points to a stop; higher prints brighter. Contrast bends the print curve – on cinema stocks it scales the density, on paper it steepens the midtones while paper white and black hold. Strength fades the print back toward the negative.
The row at the bottom sets the order: Film > Grade > Print grades the film, then prints it; Film > Print > Grade prints first and grades the print.
Surface
The paper the picture is printed on. Everything here works with any print stock, including Off.
Analog Range Limiter fits the picture between paper white and paper black. A print’s white is a little darker than screen white and its black a little lighter than screen black. Without it the picture uses the screen’s full range.
Compression brings the highlights down. The light tones ease toward a lower white, the midtones hold and the blacks lift slightly – the milky look of an old print.
Fade ages the dyes on Fujifilm’s published curves: cyan goes first, then yellow, then magenta, and the paper base yellows. Cast picks which dye leads – warm is the measured fade, cool fades the yellow first and turns the whites blue, and the middle fades all three evenly with no color shift.
Finish runs from glossy to matte. Matte lifts the blacks a little and puts the paper’s fine texture in the shadows.
Pre-flash exposes the paper weakly and evenly before the picture is printed on it. Highlights come down toward the midtones, white takes a faint veil, mid grey holds and the shadows open a touch. Flash colors that exposure: warm gives warm highlights and cool shadows, cool the reverse. Black and white prints ignore it.
Printer lights
The lamps in the printer.
Red, Green and Blue are the lab’s trim lights, in printer points. Raising one puts more of that color into the print, the way a printer corrects a cast one channel at a time.
White is the light you view the print under: 5500 K is the warm xenon of a projector, 6500 K a neutral screen white. Standard has nothing to simulate, so it ignores this one.