u/smugglerFlynn

I understand that it comes from a place of love and always thank people, but so many people in my life have started gifting me coffee beans now that they know I'm into coffee. Honestly, I miss getting the (more useful) gifts I used to get from these people.

Of course, none of these people are into coffee themselves, so inevitably, they end up giving me rather poor quality beans that I wouldn't normally want to use.

I have been gifted all of the following by well-meaning people:

- 1kg bag of supermarket brand beans

- Guinness novelty coffee

- Starbucks coffee

- Dunkin donuts apple cider flavoured coffee (so artificial)

I haven't said anything to these people as I don't want to come off as ungrateful, but the reality is that I often have 2 or 3 bags of coffee I like at home already and I would never want to forego a nice cup of coffee for something mediocre just because I have it (limited caffeine intake per day and all that). Adding another bag to my queue would also push whatever I have in my freezer even further back.

I've started donating these bags so they don't go to waste, but I really don't know how to handle this going forward without annoying people. Am I just stuck getting bad coffee from other people forever?

(Long read as I am tired of seeing recipe recommendations posts)

This is my write up on key things that define the “recipe look”, which are white balance and color shift. These two are closely connected and provide far less variability than you might think when seeing dozens (hundreds) of recipes on sites like FujiXWeekly. Rather long so bear with me.

With Fuji, your white balance setting, measured in Kelvin or simplified down to names like “daylight”, is just shifting color across same exact vertical Blue-Yellow axis that you see in camera’s color shift setting. In other words, it makes your image more blue or more yellow.

Fuji’s Red-Cyan horizontal axis in color shift settings is pretty much playing the role of green-magenta adjustment you see on other cameras and some studio lights. The important thing to notice is that Red-Cyan and Blue-Yelow axis together allow for you to shift into any color on 2D pane, like if you are dialing coordinates on a color wheel. And this shift gets applied on top of our [already shifted] white balance. These shifts are making up most of the recipe looks variability you see around here.

Shadow/highlight curve adjustment has major impact on looks as well but is pretty self explanatory - this just bumps or flattens highlights and shadows.

Combine above with a film sim and you get yourself a “recipe”.

Other settings, with the exception of color intensity and color chrome effect / color chrome FX blue (which only apply to highly saturated colors), are pretty much irrelevant to the “recipe” look, unless you pixel peep or have spent childhood in a film lab.

Now comes the most important part. I cannot overstate this: the way sunlight behaves in your geography, how scattered sun tends to be and how intense, is not secondary. It is the literal difference between “this looks just like on FujiXWeekly” and “piss yellow and muted”.

People share recipes as if they somehow bend reality - but it is your actual on location light that defines the final look. Go further north from equator and you often get diffused sun that needs an extra bump in tone curve. Direct sun goes through more layers of air, blue lights get filtered out, and you get more yellow direct light - so you need a different blue-yellow color shift. But light in shadows also looks more blue further north, which means you need to shift differently for shadows vs direct light, which means no single color shift can bring back the original “recipe look” that you saw online. No, sorry, your “Wes Anderson” recipe is not going to look the same in Finland without redialing curves and shifting differently case by case based on available direct vs scattered sunlight. Your “Classic Cuban” is going to make direct sun too yellow, and shadows disproportionately muted if used at noon in Denmark and at 6pm in Spain.

Let’s take two random FujiXWeekly recipes as examples:
- Fujicolor Super HG v2 (Classic Neg with Auto White Prio -3R -1B)
- Fujicolor Superia 800 (Classic Neg with Daylight -1R -3B)

I won’t go into tone curve differences, but notice how Superia 800 and Super HG are pretty much the same recipe, the only _real_ difference in color between them is -2R, and blue shift is circumstantial depending on available sunlight (although Superia 800 will tend to be warmer as Daylight WB itself has warm color shift compared to AWP, and then it is shifted further into yellow). Furthermore, I could have dialed second recipe with Fluorescent instead of Daylight, which shifts WB even more into yellow, and then I would remove the shift, making it a -1R 0B recipe with same exact looks. Let me now call it “Smuggler’s Negative”, full settings available on my website for a small fee of $50.

Another example is infamous Classic Cuban which uses Classic Negative film sim with AWB +4R -5B. Compare with Superia Xtra 400 which is Classic Negative with AWB +3R -5B. It is quiet literally the same recipe with minor red shift difference. Both use +4 color intensity. As other settings are only conditionally relevant or marginal, the difference in looks you see come down to location lighting, weather and geography. And your Classic Cuban magically becomes Superia Xtra 400 every time you enter a room with slightly greenish low quality LED lighting in it.

I hope that helps to navigate this recipe mess we have invented on top of Fuji’s film sims and basic color shift settings.