If you don’t use Fujifilm, the second half of that title may not mean a lot to you. However if you use Fujifilm, you may recognize Eterna as one of the “Film Simulations” that Fuji offers on it’s cameras.
My “color profile” trajectory has been interesting. Back when I shot with a D800 I used a flat profile akin to Eterna. It allowed me to just see the light in the scene, the color would come later.
When I swapped to using Sony and eventually Fujifilm, that changed. Specifically, Fujifilm had a main selling point (to me) of their stunning colors. I wanted to take advantage of it!
I began using it and love the options it presents and never gave much thought to the flat profile they offer, Eterna. That all changed back in the fall of 2024. When I captured the image to the right.
It was a quiet and calm morning at Bear Lake near the tail-end of September. They’d got an early season snow which complimented the fall colors wonderfully. When I was on scene, it quickly became apparent that the framing above was the pièce de résistance.
Many of the other color profiles resulted in too much contrast or a stark difference between the colors of the aspens and the snow and sky. The beauty of the scene in real life lay in the softness those profiles removed.
When I looked at it from the perspective of Eterna – I was floored. It looked phenomenal and the colors in the scene worked together in precisely the way they did to my eyes.
It’s a far more real-to-life color profile than many of the other profiles I love using. It’s not to say that using those profiles are invalid. Some of my favorite work that works well with other profiles would not work nearly as well if it were colored like Eterna. That lesson serves as a good segway to our final point for this post.
The photograph you take on location only serves as the beginning of the image you export. Finding the profile and tones / curves which best suit the image at hand is a constant undertaking. There is no “one size fits all” solution and while I’m loving Eterna at the moment – if the scene calls for a different look you should not be scared of branching out.
