Fujifilm FP-100C and FP-3000B film simulations

Two photographs on the felt desk printed as instants, a sunlit colour portrait on FP-100C beside a black and white portrait on FP-3000B — Two photographs printed as instants. FP-100C on the left, FP-3000B on the right.

Two instant films, each a whole material#

A peel-apart instant is its own print, out of the camera in one piece, so picking one picks everything. There is no paper to choose behind it. Select a photo, press E, and pick either film in the film picker. The preview renders on the photograph itself while you hover.

FP-100C is the colour one, ISO 100, and the film people still miss for its skin. Its scale is short, about four and a half stops, and it spends them with character: warm blacks under cool whites, skin that keeps its detail into the highlight, and a cool roll in the last half stop before paper white.

A portrait in hard sun printed through FP-100C, skin holding detail in the highlight, the towel behind rendered cool — FP-100C. Warm blacks under cool whites, and skin that holds into the highlight.

FP-3000B is the black and white one at EI 3200, fast enough to shoot by whatever light is left. Reds print light, blacks run deep, and it carries the heaviest grain of anything in Abney. Studios burned it proofing their lighting. Most people who loved it loved it for the grain.

A portrait printed through FP-3000B, black and white, skin rendered light against a grey wall — FP-3000B. Silver at EI 3200, and reds print light.

Preflash on an instant opens up the blacks instead of taming the highlights.

Both simulations are built from Fuji's own published data sheets, measured curve by curve, not from a look preset. One limit: the peel-apart softness is not modelled yet. The colour is there, the bloom is not.

The grain is the material's own#

People who shot these films talk about the texture first. FP-100C stayed surprisingly smooth for an instant print. FP-3000B poured grain over everything, and that was the appeal. Here are both prints at the same eight times enlargement.

An eight times enlargement of the FP-100C print across the shoulder and the towel, the dye image smooth with a fine colour mottle — FP-100C at eight times. Dye that formed in contact stays smooth, with a fine mottle in the midtones.

An eight times enlargement of the FP-3000B print across the eyes and glasses, the whole image made of coarse silver grain — FP-3000B at the same eight times. The image is grain.

The difference is the chemistry. FP-100C's image is dye that diffused onto the receiver sheet, so its texture is a soft colour mottle that never resolves into crystals. FP-3000B's image is developed silver, and its grain is a single field shared by all three channels, because a silver print has no colour speckle to give.

You do not need the deep zoom to see any of this before you commit. The film picker's detail pane renders a magnified crop of your own photograph through the highlighted film, grain included.

The film picker open over the desk, FP-3000B highlighted in the list and the panel beside it showing a zoomed crop of the photograph with the instant film's grain clearly visible — FP-3000B in the picker. The panel shows a zoomed crop, which is the only size grain is visible at.

One number here is taste rather than measurement. Fuji never published granularity for any peel-apart, so FP-3000B's grain strength is set by eye against period prints. Its character is the claim, not its measure.

Also in this release#

The edit card's Tone section is five rows carrying eight controls. Contrast, Shadows and Highlights each keep a second control behind the label: Density, Blacks and Whites. The label is the button that swaps them.
Correcting one colour is an eyedropper on the channel row now. Click it, click the colour on the photograph, and its sliders open in a popup. Three corrections per photograph.
Reset all sits on the edit card's title row, and the card opens the same way every time: Tone showing, Materials collapsed.
Importing reveals the arrivals. The tray opens on them, selects them, scrolls them into view and blinks them, and the import toast grows a Show them button for anyone who looked away.
B asks which book. With a book already on the desk, adding photos opens a small dialog naming the books with their page counts, and a name field to start a new one. A desk with no book skips the question.
L toggles the Share card, and the card is project-scoped now: the links published from this project, with one line counting the rest. Your home shows all of them.
Share photo and Share book are separate dialogs named by what you picked. Include the book is gone, so sharing a photo cannot publish forty spreads by accident.
Copy buttons answer with the word Copied instead of a glyph.