Recipes by image control
Negative Film recipes
Negative Film is the GR's soft, filmic color mode - muted highlights and gentle color, the closest thing in camera to a scanned color negative. Some of the community's most-loved recipes are built on it.
The recipes here tune it in different directions: warm and punchy for everyday street, faded and pastel, cooler and moodier for overcast light. Every page lists the full settings and credits whoever created the look.
Negative Film exists on the GR III, IIIx and IV alike, so everything below works across bodies - on the IV, expect a slightly warmer, brighter baseline.
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Bennet 800
by Bennet
Reggie's Color Negative
by Reggie Ballesteros
Portra 160
by Chrizz Ocampo
Asakura Negative Film
by Ricoh (GR official)
Pro Color
by Ritchie Roesch
1986 Negative
by Ritchie Roesch
Pastel Film 400
by Luke Taylor
Nostalgic Negative Film
by Chrizz Ocampo
Kodak Print
by Ritchie Roesch
Analog Negative
by Luke Taylor
EktaColor
by Ritchie Roesch
Negative Film Gold
by Luke Taylor
Analog Film 400
by Luke Taylor
Warm Spring Evening
by Luke Taylor
Turquoise Film 200
by Luke Taylor
Film Look
by Ritchie Roesch
Classic Emulsion
by Ritchie Roesch
Vintage Film
by Ritchie Roesch
About Negative Film
What Negative Film does
Ricoh added it by firmware in January 2023 (1.70 on the GR III, 1.20 on the GR IIIx; the GR IV has it from launch), and described the aim as a balance between the faded look of a photo printed from negative film and well-defined colors. In practice that is a lifted shadow curve, muted highlights and gentle color, with the widest latitude of any color mode: it forgives hard light and mixed light in a way Positive Film does not. Ricoh's staff writer Asakura notes that reds render as a slightly faded vermilion and greens carry a bluish tint, which is the print look people mean when they say it feels like film.
It does not start at zero. Out of the box Negative Film sits at Key +1, Contrast +1 and Contrast (Shadow) -1 (Asakura's official article prints the defaults), and every recipe value on this site is an absolute slider position, so a recipe that says Key 0 means one step below where the camera puts it.
How the recipes here tune it
The warm everyday looks, Bennet 800 among them, push Saturation up and rotate Hue negative, which is the direction that warms reds toward film red and skin toward pink. The faded ones get their fade from negative overall Contrast, which lifts the blacks, and not from negative Contrast (Shadow): on the GR the shadow slider works the opposite way from Fujifilm's, so a -4 there deepens the darks under a lifted curve. The daylight ones nearly all run Contrast (Highlight) at -2 to -4 so skies keep their detail. If you want to build your own, the Image Control guide has every slider's measured direction and the recipe builder turns a few answers into a settings card.
On a GR IV, Negative Film also takes grain, with a size setting the GR III generation does not have; on a III or IIIx that line of a GR IV recipe is skipped.
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