Dark Diary – High-Contrast B&W SOOC Fujifilm Recipe

The Dark Diary Fujifilm recipe is one of the Black and white film simulation recipes created based on the Monochrome film simulation and an enhanced version of the One for the Road recipe. Setting this recipe on your Fujifilm X-Trans IV cameras allows you to shoot with similar high-contrast B&W to the Daido Moriyama B&W photographs. Although it’s not 100% accurate, you can still shoot to get a similar contrasty black-and-white tone. I can say you can never 100% mimic it from the Ricoh cameras without post-processing, but this will let you achieve the effect the closest as possible.

For Fuji shooters, you might know about the in-camera Clarity setting for creative control. While shooting with this recipe, you might experience some delay due to the Clarity that has been used to increase the black & shadow tone but you can still turn it off if don’t want the delay.  To use this recipe to achieve a high-contrast tone without editing, it is recommended to shoot in a good location with harsh shadows and highlights. You need to either be manually exposed in manual mode or you can underexpose your images. You have to set the ISO and shutter speed manually and shoot at aperture f8 or f11. Well, this is just from my experience in achieving the high-contrast B&W effect using this Fujifilm recipe.

You might also be interested in the Dattebayo recipe, which is an upgraded version of the high-contrast B&W recipe. The Dark Diary recipe is suitable for use on the newer Fujifilm X-Trans IV sensor cameras including the Fujifilm X-T4, X-E4, X-Pro3, X-100V, X-S10, & X-T30 II.