darktable preset inspired by FujifilmPro 160NS

What the style changes

The style adds five darktable modules. It aims at a soft, slightly restrained Pro 160NS: pastel colors, fresh greens, natural skin and very fine grain. The sources, and how they disagree, are on the Fujifilm Pro 160NS film page. All figures below come from renders made with darktable-cli 5.6.0 at 1000 px, measured in CIELab. The Pro 400H and Portra 160 columns of our validation refer to the styles of the same names in this pack.

• Soft contrast, raised blacks. The tone curve barely moves contrast (Lsd 30.7 → 30.6 on photo 1014, 14.3 → 14.4 on photo 0775) but raises the darkest 5 % from L 2.6 to 4.5 on photo 1014. The image gets slightly lighter (L +1.2 to +1.7). It is less light and less lifted than the Pro 400H style, which gains 2.5 to 3 L and 3.4 on the brightest 5 %.
• A slightly restrained palette. Global chroma and the color equalizer hold back reds and yellows, so the sky loses 10 % of chroma (27.5 → 24.8), the sea 12 % and a pink T-shirt 8 %. That is pastel without the strong desaturation of the Portra 160 style, where the sky loses 20 %.
• Fresh greens. rgb primaries and the color equalizer turn greens toward cyan, but less than the Pro 400H style: a foliage patch moves from 115° to 126°, against 138°. Turquoise shorts move from 233.5° to 224.4°.
• Natural skin. Skin stays close to the base (chroma 16.4 → 15.6, hue 44.2° → 47.0°). The Pro 400H style pushes it toward pink (39.8°) and the Portra 160 style toward warm (49.3°). The orange equalizer setting and the vibrance keep skin from turning gray.
• Almost neutral grays. A gray T-shirt goes from b* −3.3 to −2.0, with no clear cast.
• Very fine grain, sized from Fujifilm’s RMS of 3: finer than the Pro 400H style (coarseness 1200, strength 14) and close to the Portra 160 style.

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

• No separate 160NS datasheet. The only bulletin we found, AF3-174E, is the one for the Pro 160S, the same emulsion according to Wikipedia. Nothing else lets us check that.
• The sources disagree on saturation (pastel against powerfully saturated), and on the greens. The style keeps a restrained palette and fresh greens.
• An interpretation, not a calibration. Few detailed reviews exist for this film, and several descriptions come from retailers or preset blogs. No film was scanned or measured to tune the style.
• Low-light saturation and the response to overexposure are not simulated.
• The gray trace is faint and unmeasured. The slight green in the grays (chroma 0.004) comes from one source; we did not measure a*.
• Greens were measured on a small, dull patch. The test photos have little vegetation, so the effect still needs checking on a landscape.
• The orange vest loses 20 % of chroma (46.4 → 37.0), more than skin: the held-back reds and yellows and the global chroma act on it most. The sources say nothing on this.

Tips

• For a more saturated, low-light look, add saturation yourself after the style: it is not part of it.
• Apply it early. If you plan to fine-tune the tone curve, rgb primaries, color equalizer or grain yourself, apply the style first.
• 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 grain strength or the “film” color balance rgb.
• Installation: see Install and apply darktable styles.