Fuji Film Recipe: Deep Blue Dot

My mum’s house on a clear night, using my Deep Blue Dot film recipe.

I love astrophotography, as evidenced by my Starry Night gallery. But I’m an inexperienced editor, and find it difficult to turn my RAWs into pleasing photos. So, I played around in Fujifilm X RAW Studio, and made a recipe to help me out: Deep Blue Dot. If you like it, or have suggestions on how to improve my astro shots, please leave a comment below.

Recipe

This is what I settled on for my X-M5 (X-Trans V array):

• Film simulation: Velvia/VIVID

• Grain effect: Off

• Colour chrome effect: Strong

• Colour chrome FX blue: Weak

• White balance: 4300K, Red + 1 & Blue + 1

• Dynamic range: DR200 or DR400

• Highlight tone: 0

• Shadow tone: 0

• Colour: -1

• Sharpness: +2

• High ISO NR: -4

• Clarity: +3

• ISO: Up to 3200

• Exposure compensation: 0

This is intended as a starting point to give you that rich blue colour and make the stars pop in your photos. Settings like highlight and shadow tones, or the level of noise reduction, will heavily depend on the scene.

Sample gallery

Here are some sample images of the original JPEGs vs. Deep Blue Dot. I shot these on my Fujifilm X-M5 with a Samyang 12mm f/2.0 NCS lens.