Classic Chrome preset for Lightroom & Sony Alpha
Classic Chrome is Fujifilm's documentary profile — modelled on the muted, slightly cold rendering of reportage slide film. Saturation drops across the board, shadows pick up a teal cast, greens slide toward olive, and highlights stay clean and faintly warm. It flatters overcast light and city streets far more than bright sun.
How to shoot and edit it
- It shines in flat light. Overcast, shade and blue hour keep the muted palette from looking simply underexposed.
- Expose about a third of a stop under. The lifted blacks read as film only when the midtones stay dense.
- Skin holds up well, but pull the orange luminance back a touch if faces start to look grey.
The measured values
Decoded from the genuine Classic Chrome profile. These are the slider equivalent — what it takes to reach this look without a colour profile. The .xmp you generate in the tool embeds the measured profile itself, so it needs far less on top.
Lightroom Classic
Light
Color
Presence
HSL / Color mixer
Tone curve
Color grading
Detail & effects
Grain
Sony Alpha — Creative Look
Adjustments
D-Range Optimizer
NT base captures Classic Chrome's muted, desaturated feel. Contrast +6 adds slight tone separation without punching contrast.
Sony Alpha — Picture Profile
Main Settings
Black Gamma
Knee
Color
Color Depth
Detail
Pro color matrix is the key lever — it is Sony's muted/controlled gamut, matching Classic Chrome's desaturated documentary base. LUT shows LOW contrast with LIFTED shadows (not crushed), so black level +1 and black gamma +1 lift the toe softly. R-3 is the deepest cut because Classic Chrome desaturates reds hardest (SatRed -30 in LUT); C+1 keeps the teal-shadow hint. EV -0.3 recommended.
Related looks
Classic Negative emulates consumer colour-negative film: magenta creeping into the highlights, cyan settling in the shadows, crushed blacks and midtones that stay warm and contrasty. It is the most opinionated of the Fujifilm profiles and the reason a lot of people bought into the system.
Eterna is Fujifilm's motion-picture profile: very flat, desaturated, with markedly lifted blacks and a slight cool bias. It is not a finished look — it is a base built to survive a grade, which makes it the natural pick when stills and video have to match.
Dark, desaturated and contrasty: the look that dominates urban photography feeds. Shadows go deep and cool, colour is pulled back to near-neutral, and grain keeps it from feeling digitally clean. Light separation matters more than colour.
Make your own version of Classic Chrome preset
Adjust the description, add a reference photo, or import a preset you already own — Preset Lab returns the Lightroom values and the in-camera settings together.
Open the generator