Which Fuji?

Quick Switching between Color and B&W profiles on Fuji bodies

Two ways to toggle a Fujifilm between colour and black and white: the FS1 to FS3 slots on the film simulation dial, or RECALL CUSTOM 1 SETTING on a function button.

By Abu Ashraf Masnun ·

The Nikon Zf has a small switch on the top plate, and one of its positions is black and white. Flick it and the camera is in mono. Flick it back and you are returned to the colour profile you were shooting a second ago. No menu, no thinking, no losing your place. Every time I pick one up that switch is the thing I keep playing with.

Fuji gives you plenty of ways to change film simulation. A dial on the newer bodies, the Q menu, a function button, the menu itself. None of them is that switch out of the box, because picking a film simulation off a list is not the same as jumping to a black and white of your choosing and then straight back to the colour profile you were on.

You can build it though, and how you build it comes down to one thing: whether your body has the film simulation dial. I have done it both ways and both end up about as quick as the Zf.

Black and white is not a mode on a Fuji

This is what confuses people coming from a phone or a Canon. There is no B&W button on a Fujifilm and no scene mode called Monochrome. Black and white on an X camera is a film simulation, exactly like Provia or Classic Chrome. You are not putting the camera in another mode, you are choosing a different recipe for the JPEG.

There are two of them. MONOCHROME is the old one and every X camera ever made has it. ACROS is the good one, named after Fujifilm's own black and white film, and it arrived with the X-Pro2 in 2016. Finer grain, better shadows, and grain that changes with ISO the way film does. If your camera has ACROS, use ACROS.

  • Has ACROS: X-Pro2 and everything after it, so X-T2, X-T20, X-E3, X100F, X-T3, X-T30, X-Pro3, X100V, X-T4, X-S10, X-E4, X-T30 II, X-H2S, X-H2, X-T5, X-S20, X-T50, X-M5, X100VI, X-T30 III, X-E5.
  • MONOCHROME only: X-Pro1, X-E1, X-E2, X-E2S, X-M1, X-T1, X-T10, X-A1 through X-A5, X-T100, X70, and the X100, X100S and X100T.

Each one also comes as +Ye, +R and +G in the menu. Those are colour filter simulations and I will come back to them.

If your body has the film simulation dial

Four bodies have the film simulation dial on the top plate: the X-T50, the X-M5, the X-T30 III and the X-E5. The first three have the names printed around the dial. The X-E5 does it differently, with a little window in the dial that shows the name of the look you are on. Either way, most of the positions are fixed simulations and three of them are not. FS1, FS2 and FS3 are empty slots you fill yourself.

So on these bodies I put my black and white in one slot and my colour look in the slot next to it. Switching is one click of the dial, in either direction, and I can read where I am with the camera switched off. That is the Zf switch, more or less, and it is the nicer of the two setups because you can feel it happen.

  1. MENU, IMAGE QUALITY SETTING, FILM SIMULATION DIAL SETTING. Choose FS1.
  2. Set FILM SIMULATION to ACROS+R, or whichever black and white you like.
  3. Push right on FS RECIPE and set it to ON. That is what lets the slot carry more than the simulation.
  4. Go through the FS RECIPE settings, two pages of them, and set grain, tone curve, colour, sharpness and the rest the way you want your black and white to look. DISP/BACK when you are done.
  5. Do the same for FS2 with your colour look, Classic Chrome or REALA ACE or whatever you shoot.
  6. Now the dial does it. FS1 for mono, FS2 for colour, one click apart.

You can also edit FS1 to FS3 from that same menu later without touching the dial, which is handy when you are tuning a recipe over a few weeks and cannot decide how much grain is too much.

If it does not: the Recall C1 button

On everything else, including the X-T5 and the X100VI, I do it with custom settings and a button instead. ACROS+R lives in custom setting C1 and my colour looks live in the other slots, with C2 usually Classic Chrome. I am on a colour profile almost all the time. When I want black and white I press one button, and when I want colour back I press the same button again and the camera returns to exactly where it was.

That press-again-to-go-back part is not a trick, it is what the function is for.

"Controls to which RECALL CUSTOM 1 SETTING has been assigned can be pressed to temporarily recall the settings saved to C1. Pressing the button a second time restores the previous settings"

Setting it up takes about two minutes and you do it once.

  1. Set the camera to the black and white you want. Film simulation ACROS+R, plus whatever grain and toning you like. Get it how you want it before you save anything.
  2. MENU, IMAGE QUALITY SETTING, EDIT/SAVE CUSTOM SETTING. Choose C1 and save your current settings into it. Now C1 is your black and white.
  3. Set the camera back to a colour look, Classic Chrome or REALA ACE or whatever you shoot, and save that into C2 the same way.
  4. MENU, SET UP, BUTTON/DIAL SETTING, FUNCTION (Fn) SETTING. Pick a button you can reach with the camera at your eye. Assign RECALL CUSTOM 1 SETTING to it.
  5. Done. Press the button, you are in black and white. Press it again, you are back where you were.

The reason I like this over changing the film simulation directly is that a custom setting carries everything, not only the simulation. Grain, the colour filter, the tone curve, clarity, all of it flips at once and flips back. Changing the film simulation on its own leaves the rest of your settings behind, and black and white wants different contrast than colour does.

On most bodies you also get touchscreen swipe gestures, listed as T-Fn1 to T-Fn4 in the same menu, and a swipe is easier to find by feel than a small button is.

If you just want to switch once, right now

Press Q. The film simulation tile is in the top-left corner of the grid on the default layout. Spin the rear command dial to ACROS, half-press the shutter to get out. Every X body with a Q button can do this, which is all of them since the X-E1.

One gotcha if you have the dial. The C position is the one that follows the menu, so if you change the simulation in the Q menu and nothing happens, look down and check the dial is not parked on a marked stop overriding you.

Turn on RAW+JPEG first

IMAGE QUALITY SETTING, IMAGE QUALITY, FINE+RAW. Do this before anything else in this post.

A film simulation is an instruction for building the JPEG. The RAF file, Fuji's raw format, holds what the sensor measured with nothing applied to it. So a black and white JPEG sitting next to its RAF means you still own the colour version of that photo. A black and white JPEG on its own is a one-way door.

To change your mind later, put the card back in the camera, hit playback, find the frame and choose RAW CONVERSION from the menu. Set the film simulation to whatever you want now and save. The camera writes a new JPEG with its own processor and leaves the originals alone. Fujifilm's free X RAW Studio does the same thing over a USB cable if you would rather sit at a desk.

What to put in the black and white slot

The +Ye, +R and +G versions of ACROS are simulations of the coloured glass filters film shooters screwed onto the lens. A filter lightens things of its own colour and darkens the opposite. It is the only control that separates two colours that happen to be the same brightness.

  • +Ye, yellow, is the mild one. Blue sky goes a shade darker so the clouds lift out of it, skin is barely touched.
  • +R, red, is dramatic. Sky goes almost black, clouds turn into sculpture, foliage goes very dark. It also lightens skin, which smooths out texture. This is the one I keep saved.
  • +G, green, is the portrait one. It darkens reds so lips and warm patches of skin hold their tone instead of washing out.

Two more settings are worth saving alongside the simulation, whichever slot you are using. MONOCHROMATIC COLOR only wakes up on ACROS and MONOCHROME, and it tints the image on a warm-to-cool and green-to-magenta grid. One notch warm gets you the faintly brown feel of a fibre print. Keep it small or it starts looking like an app filter.

GRAIN EFFECT matters more in black and white than in colour, because a big flat grey sky with no texture in it reads as digital immediately. Weak and small on the 40-megapixel bodies. Then Highlight +1 and Shadow +2 for a printed look, since contrast is now doing all the work colour used to do.

Why bother switching in the camera at all

Lightroom can desaturate a photo in one click, so this is a fair question. The answer is that it is not about the file, it is about the viewfinder.

Press that button and the finder goes grey, and within about ten minutes you stop composing for colour and start composing for light. A red shirt against a green wall is loud in colour and completely invisible in black and white, because the two are nearly the same brightness. You only catch that in advance if the camera is showing you mono before you press the shutter.

One catch for X-Pro and X100 owners. The optical viewfinder is a window with glass in it, so the world stays in colour no matter what the camera is set to. Flip the front lever to the electronic finder on any day you plan to shoot mono.

So: ACROS+R in one slot, Classic Chrome in the next, a dial click or a button press between them, and RAW+JPEG turned on so nothing is ever final. Set it up once and then stop thinking about menus.