Scott’s PolarChrome recipe for Nikon Z cameras
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Scott’s PolarChrome is my first recipe for Nikon made from the ground up to be shot with a Circular or Linear polarizing filter. As I have made more and more recipes, I have found that using a CPL is a cheatcode for pulling out richer colors, particularly deeper blues from the sky, but the problem is that up until now, my recipes were created using a back catalog of images that did not have a CPL mounted at the time.
For this recipe, all of my source RAW images had the Maven Filters CPL installed for a consistent baseline from which to develop this look.
This recipe is also my first stab at a “cool” or “chrome” look, with most of the sample images at 4900K-5100K. This recipe has pleasing skin tones, clean whites, and a rich color palette that places a heavy emphasis on blues and other cool tones. If you’d like to warm it up, just set it to 5500K during daylight shooting.
At the time of writing, Scott’s PolarChrome is supported on the Nikon Zf, Z5ii, Z50ii, Z6iii, Z8, Z9, and ZR cameras.
Once downloaded, copy the .NP3 file to your camera’s SD card. Navigate to Camera > Manage Picture Control > Load/Save to get it assigned into a custom slot.
I pay attention to 4 settings when using this picture control:
Active D-Lighting - Low
Film Grain - turned ON and set to Medium 1
Exposure Compensation - +1/3 to +1/2
White Balance - 4900K for bright daylight drifting towards 5300K as the sun sets
Example gallery below, all shot with Scott’s PolarChrome on the Nikon Zf with no additional processing.
I hope you enjoy shooting with this film sim! 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.
