For the longest time, I didn’t care for Astia. I found the natural warmth offputting. Then, in the fall of 2020, I found a third-party recipe that showed me that Astia could look good. One of my original sets of recipes, Soft Color, became one of my go-to recipes. Like (most? all?) of my original recipes, it used the temperature setting for WB. The recipe looks great in most lighting conditions, but I eventually discovered that the temp setting doesn’t look so good in some conditions. My current recipes use auto, which simply works in almost all settings.
I actually abandoned Astia for a while. A couple of months back, however, I started working with it again. The result was Pleasing Color. It has a slight color boost, and unlike my more saturated recipes, I actually boost the reds a little and drop the blues. This sets it apart slightly from Real Color and Vivid Color (not published as of this writing), which boost blues and either reduce the reds (Vivid Color) or leave them neutral (Real Color).
Astia is a fairly colorful sim. I consider it to have a palette similar to Velvia but warmer, less saturated, and with less natural contrast. It provides a nice alternative to Vivid Color when I need to control, for instance, blue skies more than I can with Real or Vivid Color.
Pleasing is the newest recipe in my rotation, although it is possible to consider Provian Color newer since I changed my philosophy towards it after creating Pleasing Color.
Here are some examples of the standard recipe. Again, the standard recipe is shot with the listed settings (ignoring exposure compensation, that’s really useless to program), but the jpeg is frequently developed using DR-100 or 200.
And now for examples with boosted contrast.
Here is the recipe:
Pleasing Color Film Simulation: Astia White Balance: Auto R: +3 B: -1 Dynamic Range: DR400 Highlights: 0 Shadows: +1 Color: +1 Sharpness: +2 Noise reduction: -3 Grain Effect: Weak CC Effect: Strong ISO: Auto Exp. Compensation: 0
This recipe is licensed: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)