White balance and colour
One of the things I find most attractive about Fujifilm cameras is the film modes, which replicate the colour style of classic Fuji films such as Astia, Provia and Velvia. In reality, these are just a clever way of marketing the colour styles of Fuji cameras, with these film modes representing soft, standard and vivid image styles.
That said, they work very nicely and replicate the colour and contrast of these films as closely as possible. I generally found myself using the Provia and Velvia modes for most of my images, but if you can’t quite decide which to choose, there’s a film simulation bracketing mode, which saves a single image three times with a different colour style applied to each.
The X-S1’s black & white image styles are also very good. As well as a basic black & white mode there are also red, green and yellow filter effects, which simulate the use of these filters with black & white film.
When set to auto white balance, the camera performs well and there were few times when it was necessary to switch the camera out of this mode. When shooting indoors under tungsten lights, a hint of the amber colour was left in the scene. Depending on how you wish the images to look, switching to the tungsten white balance setting produces a cleaner, more neutral result, which may be an advantage when taking studio-style images.
