Film recipes vs presets: what's the difference, and how to make your own

26 October 2026 · By Abu Ashraf Masnun

Photographers have a lot of words for "a saved look": filter, preset, profile, LUT, recipe, simulation. They're not the same thing, and the difference matters most at one moment: whether you see the look before you press the shutter, or only afterwards. A recipe is cooked in the camera. A preset is sauce you pour on later. Both can be delicious; only one lets you taste while you cook.

A film recipe is a set of camera settings applied as you shoot, so the look is in the viewfinder; a preset is a set of editing sliders applied to a photo after it's taken. In Chobial a film is both: a recipe you shoot with live, developed from the RAW, that you can still change or swap on any photo afterwards.

What a film recipe is

The word comes from Fujifilm cameras. Fujifilm bodies have film simulations built in, plus settings for white balance shift, highlight and shadow tone, colour, grain, and so on. Combine them a certain way and you get a look; write the combination down and it's a recipe. Sites like Fuji X Weekly collect hundreds of them, named after the films they're chasing.

What makes a recipe a recipe:

• It's set before the shot. You see the look while you frame, and you shoot for it: chasing the light that suits it, exposing for it.
• It's a list of ingredients. Anyone with the same camera can type it in and get the same result.
• It's tied to a camera. A Fujifilm recipe needs Fujifilm's own simulations underneath it, which is why it doesn't travel to other cameras by itself.

What a preset is (and a filter, and a LUT)

• A preset is a saved set of editor sliders, applied to a photo that already exists. Lightroom presets are the famous ones. Powerful, but you only see the result after the shot, and how good it looks depends on what the photo started as.
• A filter is a fixed look laid over a finished image, usually a JPEG or HEIF that the phone has already processed. Quick, and with not much room to change.
• A LUT is a table that maps each input colour to an output colour. It carries tone and colour well, but nothing that depends on neighbouring pixels: no grain, no halation, no glow.

There's a longer comparison of these in film emulation vs presets vs filters.

A Chobial film: recipe and preset at once

A film in Chobial is a recipe in the Fujifilm sense: you load it, see it live in the viewfinder, and every frame is developed with it. But it's applied to the RAW, and the original is kept, so it also behaves like the best kind of preset: open any photo, tap Edit, choose Film and tap another film, and the photo develops again from scratch. No recipe regret.

There are 46 built in, from Standard to Heritage; browse them on the films page. They're a starting point. Our films are good. Yours are better.

How to make your own film recipe

1. Start one. Open Films with Controls › Film › Manage Films, then tap + › New Film. Under Info, Start From copies a built-in film to work from, or begin from nothing.
2. Cook. The sections are Develop (temperature, tint, tone mapping, noise reduction, sharpening), Tone (exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, roll-off, fade, clarity and Curves), Color (saturation, vibrance, the Mixer, Toning, Channels, or B&W with a coloured filter), Effects (grain, halation, bloom, vignette) and LUT (import a .cube and set its strength).
3. Taste. Hold the preview to compare with how the film started, and tap Photo to try it on one of your own photos.
4. Name it. Under Info, give it a name and a code of up to three letters for its badge.
5. Save. Tap the checkmark. It's in My Films, and on the camera's row of films.

Or work backwards: edit a photo until you love it, then tap Save as Film at the top of the editor's Film panel, and the edits become a film of your own. The step-by-step version is in make your own film.

Sharing a recipe: QR code, link, file or .cube

1. In Films, open a film's card with ⓘ, or tap ••• › Share Film on one of your own.
2. Tap Share Film and the card turns over to its code. Anyone can scan it with their phone's camera.
3. Tap Share Film again to send it As a Link, As a Picture of the code, or As a File.

A friend scans the code, taps the chobial.app link, or opens the .chobial file, and their latest photo develops in your film; they tap Load It or Add to My Films. A film built on an imported LUT is too big for a code, so it goes as a file. And ••• › Submit to Chobial sends it to us: the best films ship inside the app, credited to whoever made them. More in sharing films.

To take the look outside Chobial, ••• › Export Color LUT (.cube) on one of your films saves its tone and colour as a .cube file for Lightroom, Resolve and other editors. That needs Chobial Pro, and remember the LUT rule from above: grain and halation stay behind. The workflow is in export a LUT from iPhone to Lightroom and Resolve.

Free and Pro, plainly

Making, sharing and receiving films is free. 22 of the built-in films save free, and so does a film you make from one of them or from scratch. A film built on a Pro film is marked Pro, and saving photos in it needs Chobial Pro, the same as the film it came from. Every film is free to shoot and try, so you can taste before you buy.

Fujifilm is a trademark of FUJIFILM Corporation. Lightroom is a trademark of Adobe. DaVinci Resolve is a trademark of Blackmagic Design. Chobial is not affiliated with any of them, or with Fuji X Weekly.

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