I’ll be honest with you. I was never a fan of B&W photography until recently. Granted, some of that is because, as a kid shooting film, it was a color roll or a B&W roll. Why would I have wanted to drop 12 or 24 frames of B&W?
I’ll also note that I was a fan of colorized movies as a kid. I now appreciate B&W movies.
Anyway.
It was only after I got my X-T30 that I started shooting B&W, and I pretty much only use the Acros sim, usually with the red filter.
All of my recipes add grain to the jpeg. I like the film grain, and Fujifilm’s reputation for fairly realistic grain is one of the reasons I picked the platform. Unlike the other sims, Acros is naturally grainy/noisy, especially at high ISO. I still add grain on top of that. I use a lower ISO setting in this recipe to compensate for the natural grain. If I redevelop an image using this recipe, sometimes it is very noisy due to having been shot with a higher ISO than I would if I originally took the picture in B&W. It creates some interesting looks.
Cleancros was an attempt to create a good, general-purpose B&W recipe. As the name might imply, it is supposed to be “clean.” It’s been the only B&W recipe in my camera for some months now.
This recipe differs from my current color recipes in one regard: my highlights and shadow settings. I have highlights set to 0 on this one instead of 1, and my shadows are +1 instead of -1. I like the darker look I get from those settings. And, of course, I can adjust those when I develop the image to see if I can add some contrast or if the shadows are too dark.
Examples of the standard recipe. Note that when I say standard, the jpeg was almost certainly generated using a different EV and DR than in the settings I provide.
Notice how the skies range from fairly light to almost black. That’s a function of the white balance settings. B&W lets you do some crazy things that would look terrible in color (unless you are going for a weird look!).
Now some examples with boosted contrast.
Cleancros Film Simulation: AcrosR White Balance: Auto R: 0 B: +9 Dynamic Range: 400 Highlights: 0 Shadows: +1 Color: 0 Sharpness: +2 Noise reduction: -3 Grain Effect: Weak CC Effect: Off ISO: 640 Exp. Compensation: 0
This recipe is licensed: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)