The goal isn’t to make true to life colours, or Kodachrome primaries, but to make flattering portraits and landscapes. Skin tones are lightened and yellows shift slightly to ruddier tones. Overall colours are muted, but reds and particularly greens remain vibrant. Blues are considerably darkened improving sky contrast. Does this all sound right to you? Have you had different experiences with Fujifilm Instax cameras, printers and the Instax Mini Color and Monochrome films? Resulting from improved emulsion, development accelerators and development control technology it will keep your images colour-true for years

High Key – the original has tone and detail everywhere, but is very close to blowing out. All colour shades are light ascend natural to the eye and errors are very apparent.If you want to do it all in camera, at least you now have that option. Just bear in mind (or pretend not to notice) the less than truly panchromatic colour sensitivity, slightly borked green greys, blown highlights and murky shadows, both of which are mercifully not as bad as Instax Color. The original film is what matters if you are showing those in person, but the scan is what counts if you are presenting online; and I can see more detail in enlarged scans than in the originals. Shadows rapidly lose detail while highlights are lost. That said, I got reasonable mid-tones and saw more detail that my Instax Color images throughout the range; initially leading me to suspect that the grain was finer.

Fujifilm Instax Color is much like that, but with less dynamic range, latitude, subtlety and overall charm. Blues in particular come out very dark. I almost thought it was a printer profile issue until I realised the printer was working right, but didn’t account for the film’s rendition; shots taken digitally and printed come out more or less as if they had been shot directly on Instax Mini Color. until we see the eventual release of Leica’s own version, which is most likely rebranded Fujifilm film, anyway – EMULSIVE Low Key – high contrast low key image and I know where all the detail is and how far the light patches go into the shadows. If you've got an itch to shoot film again and don't want to have to find a local lab to develop your shots, instant film is a good alternative. It delivers results that almost match digital in their immediacy. Whoever decided to cancel production at Polaroid should be banging their head on a table, because while they assumed the future was exclusively digital, Fuji steadfastly supported their instant film format through the 2000s and into the 2010s. As digital took over the consumer space, something funny happened. People grew nostalgic for the instant photography of old, and when they found Polaroid had essentially disappeared, they turned to the next best thing, something they probably had never used before even though it had been around all along: Fuji Instax film.Nice write up! Thanks for the Shoutout! Totally makes sense.. I am already 4 shots in with 6 to go in my Neo… “INSTAX MINI COLOUR SENSITIVITY” section, you are spot on with how the mono handles the different colors. In my 4 shots, i have done one afternoon, one portrait with flash, multiple exposure w/flash and early morning shadows shot. I plan on pushing through with some more day time shots and different subjects to get a nice sample set to look at. The enhanced developing process produces a more rapid image - less waiting time for complete development Year after year, instant film cameras remain popular gifts to give and receive for their old-school, tangible imagery. There’s genuinely nothing like a photograph shot on an instant film camera. From light leaks to blown out exposures to the notion that the one shot you get is the only shot you get, instant film cameras have been an exciting way to capture current moments since our parents’ generation that simply doesn’t exist with the modernized DSLR or smartphone camera. But what if you've got an honest-to-goodness Polaroid camera? The company has been reborn in the 21st century—it's gone through some name changes over the years, from the Impossible Project to Polaroid Originals, but today it's just called Polaroid. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Fujifilm claim 12 line pairs per mm of film resolution for Instax Mini and my 600dpi scans proved capable of wringing as much detail out as possible (300dpi would have been sufficient, maybe even less).

Even in low light scenarios, due to its high-speed rating, Instax Mini Film will produce amazingly sharp images. Another user benefit is that it has been improved to lessen the developing time before you see your print - a real benefit when you are photographing young children who are notorious for wanting everything "yesterday". Instax Mini Film has also been enhanced to maintain its stability over the years making it a good choice for archival storage. Those pictures you shot when your kid was 4 - or during that trip to Disneyland will still be around long after he's out of high school. Fuji has also extended the working temperature range of this film to include 40 - 104F so you need not worry about using it year-round. I chose a number of images that I knew would be challenging to print and would cover the full spectrum of what you might shoot. I printed each image in the SP-2 printer and resolution test images (below), were done at exactly the printer resolution to avoid detail loss through resampling. Loki Poster – I’ve had trouble printing this tip my satisfaction in the past. Scene shoes a high dynamic range and lots of shadow detail. Out of Fuji's three instant film formats, Instax Wide makes the biggest prints. The Lomo'Instant Wide is the camera to get if you're interested in taking instant and impactful snaps with that format. It offers more artist-friendly features than you get with the Fuji Instax Wide 300, including multiple exposures and a split-image attachment for the lens. Who It's For Left to right: Original, Color, Monochrome (using a colour image), Monochrome (using a desaturated image)

Lomography Lomo'Instant Automat Glass

Color Fuji Instax film was developed in the original Polaroid era, and shares the same longevity as Polaroid. You can be confident that all your color Fuji Instax shots will last for many years without any strange chemical deterioration or major discoloration. However, while the image quality is great, the actual size of the image is a major limiting factor. The image is small enough that it can be difficult to make out details, and if the image is blown up too much when scanning, it can turn fuzzy despite the image itself being relatively sharp. You could cheat at instant photography competitions, if it wasn’t for a manufacturing defect on the printer which gives purple light leaks on the long sides of the print, but hey ho, it’s the only printer you can buy. I’d not dare call these “art” but they are indicative of street scenes. Unlike the test prints, these were made with Instax cameras and then I worked them over in Photoshop to extract highlight and shadow detail, adjust mid-tones curves and sharpen any detail I found, then I desaturated them to remove colour casts. Thus, the images you see look better than the originals. I also took a few colour photos for comparison and so you have a better feeling for the light that day.