I think you’ll find it hard to reach a consensus. In most scenarios I prefer 100% hue preservation, with slightly positive skew. All comes down to personal taste, and for that we have presets.
The problem with LUTS can be if you didn’t make it then it is not often clear what it does… If it has just color or color and tone or whatever. Since its basically just a map then the farther you are from the conditions in which it was created then you are less likely for it to look as intended. Depending on these elements it might not work at the current place in the pipeline or even with the tonemapping of filmic or sigmoid applied so I hope you find a solution but you might just find that the luts give you this match here and there but not consistently…
This is a very nice breakdown of the issues requirements and uses of LUTs…
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Thanks Jakob! It’s up to you whether you want to add more features to sigmoid and increase the complexity (its simplicity compared to filmic is certainly one of its strengths), or whether you are happy for other modules to perform what sigmoid does not. As I mentioned before, you can get almost identical results by playing with the sliders and sometimes involving other modules. As for me, I’m going to stop making grand statements about sigmoid because every day I change my mind about something. I have just played with some forest photos I had, and sigmoid gave me the most pleasing results. And on another beach photo, I got some lovely cloud detail by playing with the contrast and skew alone, which I had previously never managed to have much success at.
As I’ve gone somewhat off topic now, I want to go back to the general area of what this thread is about and ask you if you have noticed any difference with different raws and whether Fujifilm in particular plays differently with sigmoid because of the x-trans sensor?
I assume Fujifilm supply some raw conversion software with the camera - maybe you could use this to export a TIFF with as high bit depth as possible then edit that. I’m not sure, but this might be a halfway house between editing a jpg and a raw. Just a thought.
They do. And it can export to TIFF as well.
But the software is only available for Win and MacThings.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Maybe the Windows app can be run in Wine?
Classic Chrome, but as a dtstyle for Sigmoid
I don’t know if this fits here… I was looking for a style that loosely resembles Fuji‘s Classic Chrome simulation and found a solution that works pretty good for my needs:
I really like the characteristics of the new Sigmoid module, I was never able to get similar results with Filmic. Sigmoid surely does some things different than the Fuji engine, but I am fine with this discrepancy, after all I am not looking for an exact replication but rather its “direction”.
Instead of a 3D LUT, I wanted to have a normal LUT that fits in a dtstyle, so I do not have to fiddle around with PNG file locations and its complexity.
What I came up with is a variant of Stuart Sowerby’s “Fuji XTrans II V3” LUTs, converted to a dtstyle using manu-mannattil/clut2dtstyle. The newer XTrans III LUTs cannot be used with Sigmoid, since they rely on their own base curve and do not play very well with Sigmoid. But the “XTrans II V3” looks very good to me:
- Enable Sigmoid, adjust contrast to about 1.8 and adjust hue conservation to your liking
- Enable the color lookup table module with this preset
- If you want to compensate for the heavy desaturation (which Classic Chrome is famous for), use the color balance rgb module and add about 20% global saturation.
Fuji XTrans II - Classic Chrome v3.dtstyle (2.1 KB)
Examples:
20211012_0128.CR2.xmp (9.5 KB)
(Original on Play Raw, CC BY-SA)
DSC05537.ARW.xmp (9.7 KB)
(Original on Play Raw, CC BY-SA)
2022-12-13_DSC07298.ARW.xmp (9.6 KB)
2022-12-13_DSC07298.ARW (23.9 MB)
This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
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Long time no see, Nico. Welcome and great that you finally found the way here 
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Lately, I have experimented with the color lookup table and rgb tone curve modules. Very simply (but tediously), I took a picture of a color target with various film sims, then replicated the monochrome fields with the rgb tone curve, and the color fields with the color lookup table.
As far as I’ve been able to ascertain so far, this works beautifully, and seems much more robust than my previous LUT attempts.
If you want to play with these film simulations, here they are, packaged as dtstyles: Fuji Styles.zip (7.8 KB)
Note that these styles are intended to come after an instance of sigmoid with default (1.5) contrast. The tone curves might require minor tweaking if they’re used after filmic instead. I have noticed that these styles tend to produce very dark shadows. I suspect that the tone curves might need an additional control point below the dark patch to soften the shadows a bit – although they seem generally in line with how my camera renders the shadows. I’ll try to shoot a different color target with more patches in the shadows area to investigate this further.
If you want to make your own style like that, or verify my tables, here are the source and target images: Color Target.zip (39.2 MB) (CC-BY-NC-SA)
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Sigmoid makes the shadows pretty dark I think overall …maybe try tweaking the black setting there and see how it impacts your styles… Jandren I think suggested that it can be used for artistic purposes on the blacks maybe this is one of them 
I’ll download them and see if it makes any consistent sense when you try that…
Hi, I mostly agree with what @paperdigits has said :
- Replicating the look won’t be a 2 clic process as in camera processing is a far more complex than that.
- the only way to get the OOC look easily is using a software with commercial ties to fujifilm and access to that processing recipe.
- looking at the OOC jpeg is a good reference point but processing it to your own taste and exploring what the raw offers your seems more valuable to me
That said replicating the fujifilm look is quite possible and have already been a challenge on this forum ( [PlayRaw] Something different: Match the JPG! - #12 by clind XMP attached in the post ) but as already mentioned : trying to replicate the OOC look each time as your raw processing starting point will be time consuming and do not seem to me to be a good strategy …
I tried replicating the OOC to a satisfactory result without having too much sliders fiddling but in the end I had to just a bit … on this particular image i find the camera processing underwhelming and I think the raw have much more potential.
DSCF5240.RAF.xmp (18.4 KB)
Apart from basic exposure (1slider) and sigmoid (1 slider) and the haze removal (to add general constrast - 1clic) the main leverage comes from color balance RGB and color zones and a tad from contrast equlizer.
I guess the approach taken by @bastibe can yield better results on a systematic / bulk approach
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[EDIT] ping @bastibe
Dear Bastian.
Thanks for this tedious jobs, I was missing the t3mujin dtstyles by @t3mujin (thanks to him too!) that I used a lot (because I don’t have enough time anymore to play around too much).
Just a question: I tested one of your style (Classic chrome) and it activated the color lookup table and the tone curve module, not the RGB tone curve. But you explicitely mentioned the latter in your post. Did I miss something?
Thanks again.
Denis
DT chart I think has now been repaired I will have to test it out… Maybe not in 4.2 but from a recent PR on Github for anyone that made use of it… I found it was a pretty good way of matching a source image to the raw…
No, I just said the wrong thing. Since the styles are married to sigmoid anyway, I don’t think it makes much of a difference which one we use. (right?)
Thanks for the answer. Well, regarding the difference between RGB and not RGB curve, I have no idea if it’s a big deal.
Again, thanks for making the styles available.
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I experimented some more with those tone curve/color lookup table styles. I think they work better if you put tone curve into linked RGB mode. This seems to prevent the shadows from going overly dark.
At any rate, I’m quite happy with the styles.
In the process of learning their use, I have rediscovered the tone curve as a tool for image editing in general, which I somehow had lost sight of after the tone equalizer was announced. Very useful indeed.
Regarding the original topic of the post, I found a video in which someone uses an utility to create a camera profile for Darktable from an existing picture. Maybe this could do the trick for you, creating the camera profiles for every film simulation and then use them.
Hope it helps.
That has just recently been repaired…it was broken for some time… I think after v 3.6 maybe … the fix may also have come after the release of 4.2 I will have to check but it is working now…
It has been mentioned many times here on the forum and is more recently documented quite nicely here…
Edit…
Ya just last week so it would have to be compiled and run from the master branch to work at the moment…
I am running the latest git version on Manjaro/Arch/XFCE. When I start dt-chart from the terminal and import a .pfm target file nothing is displayed … but no crash now!
Are you using the LAB color space?? I will try on my end on a Win machine