Superia 400

Superia 400 is the exact opposite bias to Kodak, and that is the whole reason to name it. Where a Kodak consumer film pushes yellow into the highlights, Superia pushes green into the shadows and cyan into the sky.

It is the cheap film of the other hemisphere of taste. A street picture on Superia reads cooler, harder and more modern than the same picture on Gold, and it never looks nostalgic in the warm way that a Kodak snapshot does.

Name the stock and place the green. Say a green cast in the shadows and keep the midtones clean, or the model tints the whole frame.

Ask for the cyan sky separately. Superia renders blue as a cool cyan, and naming it stops the model from giving a warm Kodak sky by default.

Steer the three carriers. Skin comes back slightly cool and can look green in open shade. Green foliage goes saturated and clean rather than yellow. The sky goes cyan.

Use it for street work, for flat overcast daylight, for city scenes with concrete and glass, and for any snapshot that should not feel warm.

Leave it alone for a warm portrait. The cool bias drains a face of red, and in shade the skin can pick up a green cast that is hard to fix.

Pro 400H is the professional version of the same Fujifilm bias: cooler, finer grained, lower in contrast and made for overexposure. Superia is the cheap one, with more contrast and more grain. Gold 200 and UltraMax 400 are the Kodak answer, and they push yellow where Superia pushes green.

Cinema publishes Cross Process at /techniques/cinema/, which swings every colour in the frame with the wrong chemistry. Superia is a small, built-in bias that lives in the shadows and in the sky, and the rest of the picture stays normal.

Fujifilm sold Superia X-TRA 400 from the late 1990s, with a fourth colour layer that Fujifilm built to hold colour under fluorescent light. It became the default cheap film across Japan and much of Asia, and it is the reason the cool green street snapshot reads as Japanese rather than American. In 2023 Fujifilm replaced it in many markets with a stock sold simply as Fujifilm 400, and the price of the remaining Superia rose sharply.

The whole picture comes back green. Say the green cast sits in the shadows, the midtones stay clean, and the sky is cyan.

The result is warm, because a model reaches for Kodak by default when it hears film. Name Fujifilm, name the cyan sky, and add no warm cast, no yellow highlights to the ban.