Scott’s Ilford 400 Film Recipes for Nikon Z
Note: if you are looking for a similar Fuji simulation, I’d recommend the XP2 recipe here.
Today I am sharing my first Picture Controls for Nikon Z cameras. These were specifically developed to be used on the Nikon Zf alongside the new Film Grain feature that came with firmware 3.0.
At the time of writing, these are supported on the Nikon Zf, Z5ii, Z50ii, Z6iii, Z8, Z9, and ZR cameras.
Scott’s Ilford 400 comes in three variants, a higher contrast Flexible Color version and lower and mid contrast versions that more closely resemble scanned film. Download them below.
Once downloaded, copy the files to your camera’s SD card. Navigate to Camera > Manage Picture Control > Load/Save to get them assigned into custom slots.
Note: If you import RAW files that used this picture control into Lightroom with the “camera settings” import flag set, they will be badly tinted due to the way that the underlying HSL had to be set in NX Studio. Import with the flag disabled to fix this. Lightroom in general does not import Flexible Color profiles correctly with “camera settings”.
I pay attention to 3 settings when using this picture control.
For Ilford 400:
Active D-Lighting - set to Normal, but will move to High if an extremely high contrast scene
Film Grain - turned ON and set to Medium 2
Exposure Compensation - usually set at either +1/3 or +2/3 to offset the loss of contrast Active D-Lighting introduces.
For Ilford 400 LO:
Active D-Lighting - OFF
Film Grain - turned ON and set to Medium 2
Exposure Compensation - Set to 0.0
For Ilford 400 MID:
Active D-Lighting - Low
Film Grain - turned ON and set to Medium 2
Exposure Compensation - Set to +1/3
I manually set my White Balance to 10,000K for all black and white picture controls for brighter whites.
Above: Scott’s Ilford 400 LO on the left, Scott’s Ilford 400 on the right
Above: Scott’s Ilford 400 LO on the left, Scott’s Ilford 400 on the right
I hope you enjoy shooting with these! If you found this helpful, please consider buying me a coffee so I can fuel up and continue to bring you more content like this by clicking the Ko-fi button below.
