Last Summer Roll Fujifilm Recipe: Full Settings

Last Summer Roll is a Fujifilm recipe made by the Italian photographer Emanuele De Luca (he is on Instagram here). It is built on Classic Negative, with a warm white balance shift and a strong Color Chrome Effect. The full settings are below, followed by the photos I shot with it over a few spring days in the South of France.

I took my Fujifilm X-E5 and a single lens, the 35mm f/1.4, and left the recipe loaded for the whole trip. I didn't touch a setting once. That was the idea. Pick a look, trust it, and spend the mental energy on what's in front of the lens instead of in the menu.

Last Summer Roll settings

Which cameras it works on

The recipe needs Classic Negative and Color Chrome FX Blue, so it runs on X-Trans IV and X-Trans V bodies. Smooth Skin Effect only exists on X-Trans V, which covers the X-E5, X-T5, X-H2, X-H2S, X-S20, X-T50 and X100VI. On an X-Trans IV body like the X-T30 II, X-T4 or X-E4, skip that one line and set everything else as listed. The difference shows up on skin and nowhere else.

DR400 needs ISO 640 as a minimum, which is why the ISO range starts there.

What it looks like

The strong Color Chrome Effect pushes reds and blues into a denser, more film-like response, and the weak Smooth Skin Effect is part of why it handles people so well. The result has that quality I keep chasing in color work: like a roll of film you shot on a trip, forgot about, and found in a drawer two years later. Warm without tipping into orange. Soft, but with enough grain and contrast to feel real. On the X-E5, with the 35mm sitting at a natural field of view, it turned out to be the right companion for slow days and aimless walking.

If you want more looks in this register, I keep a running set in my favorite Fujifilm recipes and a warmer, harder-light group in the Mediterranean summer set.

Sète

I spent most of my time in Sète around the port. There's something about a working harbor that I find hard to walk past without stopping every few meters. The fishing boats with their flaking paint, the ropes and floats piled on the quays, the water throwing back the light in a way that never sits still. Last Summer Roll loved all of it.

The warm shift gave the hulls and the old paint a lived-in richness, and the DR400 setting held onto the bright sky reflecting off the water without letting the highlights go. I shot a lot at the wide end of the aperture, letting the background of the port soften behind a coil of rope or a mooring line, the 35mm doing the quiet work it does best.

Avignon

Avignon was the slower half of the trip. I didn't have a plan, which is usually when I take my best photos. I wandered the streets, followed the shade when the sun got high, and stopped at terraces to drink coffee and watch people go by. The spring light there is gentle, nothing like the hard glare of high summer, and the recipe sat beautifully in it.

Warm stone walls, the dappled light under plane trees, a cup of coffee on a small round table catching the sun. Classic Negative renders those everyday moments with a softness that makes them feel like memories almost as you're shooting them. I kept the exposure pushed about half a stop most of the day, which gave the light backgrounds that washed, sunlit quality I wanted.

By the time I got home I had a card full of frames that needed nothing done to them, which is the whole reason I shoot this way. A few of them are already printed and sitting on my desk. That's where a recipe like this one really proves itself: not on a screen, but on paper, where the warmth and the grain stop being settings and just become the photograph.