Pro 400H

Pro 400H is the mint and cyan look of wedding work through the 2010s. It runs cool where Portra runs warm, and the cool sits in the shadows rather than over the whole frame. A white dress on Pro 400H reads as pale mint, not as pure white.

It also rewards heavy overexposure more than any other stock in this file. At two stops over the contrast drops away, the highlights wash out, and the picture goes airy. That combination of cool shadows and washed highlights is the whole reason people still ask for it.

Name the stock, then place the green. Say a mint green cast in the shadows, not a green cast over the picture. The bias lives in the dark half of the frame.

Ask for the overexposure by name. Two stops over, washed highlights, low contrast. Without it the stock reads as an ordinary cool film.

Steer the three carriers. Skin goes pale and slightly cool, with very little redness. A blue sky comes back pale cyan rather than deep blue. Green foliage goes mint and blue-green instead of yellow-green.

Use it for weddings, for bridal and pale clothing, for open shade and overcast light, and for any picture that has to feel airy.

Leave it alone when you want warmth on a face. Pro 400H takes the red out of skin, and a portrait that needs a healthy complexion is a job for Portra 400.

Portra 400 is the direct comparison, at the same speed and for the same job, with the opposite bias. Portra runs warm with muted yellow-green. Pro 400H runs cool with mint and cyan. Superia 400 is also a Fujifilm stock with green shadows, but it is a consumer film with more contrast and more grain.

Cinema publishes Cross Process at /techniques/cinema/, and that is a much larger shift: the wrong chemistry swings every colour in the frame. Pro 400H is a small, deliberate bias that only shows in the shadows and the whites.

Fujifilm introduced Pro 400H in 2004 as the replacement for Fujicolor NPH 400, and it carried a fourth colour layer that Fujifilm built for mixed light. It became the signature stock of the light and airy wedding style, and the digital presets that copied that style are still sold. Fujifilm announced the discontinuation in January 2021 and named raw material supply as the reason. The remaining rolls sold out through that year at rising prices.

The whole frame comes back tinted green, like a bad white balance. Say the green sits in the shadows and the whites go mint, and say the midtones stay clean.

The result is a normal cool photograph with no lift. The overexposure is missing. Say exposed two stops over with washed, airy highlights and low contrast.