Summary

The article provides a follow-up review of the Ricoh GRiii X camera, focusing on additional comparisons and the author's personal experience with the Ricoh Recipes app to achieve various film simulation effects.

Abstract

In this follow-up article, the author shares their thoughts and photographic samples using three specific film simulation recipes—Color Film, Kodakolor, and B&W Negative + Red Filter—available through the Ricoh Recipes app for the Ricoh GRiii X camera. The author compares these recipes in terms of their ability to produce vintage effects, consistency, and overall satisfaction, while also revealing their method for adding time/date stamps using the DazeCam app on iOS. While the Color Film recipe is deemed the most reliable, it lacks a "wow factor." The Kodakolor recipe is noted for its vintage vibe but tends to skew too warm with a green tint and loses highlight detail. The B&W Negative + Red Filter recipe, though not as impactful as expected, shows promise when capturing storm clouds and is suggested for further experimentation. The author concludes with intentions to keep the Color Film recipe as a standard, replace the Kodakolor recipe, and adjust the B&W recipe for better results, while continuing the search for the perfect retro/vintage film simulation.

Opinions

The Color Film recipe is praised for its consistency and reliability but is considered unexciting.
The Kodakolor recipe captures a vintage feel effectively but struggles with a warm/green color shift and loss of highlight detail.
The B&

Film Sim Follow Up | Ricoh GRiii X

Additional comparisons and review of the Ricoh Recipes app

Kodakolor Film Sim via Ricoh GRiii X 40mm F2.8

This article exists as a follow up companion article to my previous write-up “Film Simulation Americana | Ricoh GRiii X” . Read that first for additional context, although this should work as a standalone posting as well. Cheers!

Last time on the “Ricoh Files” (ugh, I cringed at that too):

“More importantly, the Ricohs produce amazing raw files that often rival my professional Canon cameras, and also produce unique “film simulation” jpegs. Some fans of Fujifilm may be familiar with their film simulations, and I *admit* that Fujifilm probably produces a better “out of the box” film simulation experience.

Fujifilm gives you expertly designed and researched in-camera film presets that are honestly pretty awesome. Ricoh goes the more creative route and gives you some barebones building blocks, but those blocks are optimized to be combined into creative formulas or “recipes” to emulate an almost infinite amount of film simulations if you can be creativeLuckily, for those who don’t want to be so creative, Ricoh also has a free app called Ricoh Recipes which you can use to just plug-and-play those recipes and get your desired look.”

Today I will be breifly sharing my thoughts/photos from using 3 previously mentioed Ricoh Recipes. These include the basic “Color Film”, vintage “KodaKolor”, and “B&W Negative +Red Filter”.

Also, some of you have asked how I put the time/date stamp on my photos.

This is done very simply with an app called DazeCam on the iOS store. I haven’t checked if it’s on the other platforms as well. Regardless, its my favorite time stamp app (I’ve tried out like 6 or 7 now). It also has some quick to use and quick to disable (my common route) vintage film effects. I mostly use it for the date stamp.

In this comparison today I turned all of the other film effects off to keep the shots consistent.

Color Film (CF)

For all basic purposes the color film sim performed the best. It was consistent in quality and giving me the shot I wanted, while still seeming a bit vintage-ish. However, it was also the most boring. I like most of my shots I take with it, but I sorta expect to. There’s not really a wow factor. I will probably still use this setting though as a basic starting point.

KodaKolor (KK)

This recipe seems to get the vintage vibe across a little bit better than the basic Color Film recipe, but it also runs into the same warm/green shift issue that the Americana recipe did. I think I might end up tweaking this one to give me more of a cooler shift, or at least numb the green pea puke vibes. Also, highlights seem to get absolutely obliterated with this recipe.

B&W Negative +Red Filter (Mono)

This one I really need to play with a bit more. The “red filter” effect isn’t exactly emphasized as much as I thought it would be. It still felt a lot like a basic monochrome photo filter. However, when exposing the composition to include the storm clouds, I started to fall in love with this recipe. I shot every photo an entire stop underexposed , but the photos still came out a bit bright too me. Again, more experiments needed.

Conclusion

I will keep the CF as my standard U1 mode.
I will replace KK with something else
I will teak the Mono to be more like a typical red filter monochrome AND tweak the exposure settings to bring it darker a bit.

I am still searching for a retro/vintage film recipe that doesn’t ruin my greens or seem too overbearing. My girlfriend recently told me I was impossible to please when it came to cameras, maybe she’s right. I’ll keep trying a few more film sim recipes though before I admit that to her.

Check out my previous article: Photographer Interview | Eric Murray

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