darktable preset inspired by FujifilmSensia 100

What the style changes

The style adds three darktable modules. It aims at Sensia 100 as Fujifilm’s datasheet and a handful of reviews describe it: natural color, a slightly warm cast, and a midtone slope steeper than Provia 100F’s. The sources are detailed on the Fujifilm Sensia 100 film page. All figures below come from renders made with darktable-cli at 1000 px, measured in CIELab, with the base rendering as reference.

• Steeper midtones. The datasheet curve reads at a slope of about 2.1 in the midtones, against about 1.75 for Provia 100F on the same reading method (both are our readings of the graphs). The tone curve raises contrast on photo 0775 from 14.3 to 17.8, above the Provia 100F style (16.5). Blacks deepen (L5 2.6 to 1.1) and the brightest 5% of photo 1014 rise from L 87.9 to 91.8.
• Restrained blues. Blue saturation is lowered slightly (×0.95) and the hue corrected by −2°. Sky and sea chroma rise by about 6% and 4%, against 19% and 27% for the Provia 100F style, and their hues stay within 4°. This fits reviews that call the blues slightly washed out.
• A slight warmth. The “film” instance of color balance rgb tints the midtones (45°) and, less, the highlights (60°); shadows and blacks stay neutral. Skin moves 5° toward orange (49° against 44°) and gains 19% chroma, while staying within the range of the t3mujinpack style for this film (53°).
• Modest saturation. Chroma +0.03 through color balance rgb, in line with reviews that find Sensia less “pop” than other Fujifilm slide films.
• No grain. With an RMS granularity of 8, grain is invisible at normal sizes.

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”).

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, color equalizer and tone curve, therefore overwrite any settings you had already made in those modules. Your earlier settings stay in the history stack. Details in Install and apply darktable styles.

Limits

• An interpretation, not a calibration. The sources disagree on contrast, saturation and warmth, and do not always say which Sensia version (I, II or the [RA] of the datasheet) they describe.
• Some reviews unread. Three community pages could only be read through search summaries when the style was made, so their statements were not used as evidence here.
• No source for “more saturated than Provia”. The initial brief for the style asked for that; none of the sources found says so. The style keeps a saturation close to Provia’s, with a little more contrast and warmth.
• Approximate slopes. The slopes read on the datasheet graph are accurate to about ±0.1.
• Discreet on contrasty photos. The effect is small on an image that is already contrasty.
• The pink T-shirt on photo 1014 overshoots. Its chroma rises by 28% and its hue slides 8° toward orange: the steep per-channel curve saturates reds more than on the Provia 100F style. No posterization is visible.
• Greens are not verified. The test photos contain none.
• Long exposures and aging are not simulated. The datasheet asks for a 5B filter from 2 minutes; the color shift of aged film is not simulated either.

Tips

• Compare with Provia 100F and Astia 100F. The Fujifilm slide styles share the same approach; Sensia sits close to Provia, a little more contrasty and warmer.
• Everything stays editable. The style’s modules are ordinary modules in your history: you can adjust or switch off each of them afterwards.
• Installation: see Install and apply darktable styles.