Fujifilm · ISO 160 Color negative
Fujifilm NPS 160
NPS 160 was Fuji's professional portrait colour negative through most of the 1990s, the cool-toned alternative to Kodak's Vericolor and later Portra 160NC. Fuji introduced it in the early 1990s and replaced it in 2004 with Fujicolor Pro 160S, later renamed Pro 160NS. The S in NPS stood for Soft, distinguishing it from NPC at the same speed with a punchier curve. Wedding studios and school portrait operations loaded NPS for skin that read smooth and faintly cool.
The colour philosophy defined the film. Where Portra 160NC ran warm and slightly golden in skin tone, NPS pushed toward neutrality with a hint of cyan in the mid-tone shadows. Most photographers who compared the two agreed that Portra was easier to print to a flattering skin tone out of the box, while NPS gave a more honest rendering that experienced printers could push either direction. For Asian and South Asian skin in particular, the NPS neutrality often read better than the Kodak warm bias.
Grain at 160 was clean but not Reala-clean. The film was built for portrait reproduction rather than landscape resolution, so Fuji prioritised colour fidelity and shadow detail over headline grain numbers. Latitude was wide: four stops of overexposure on careful scanning, and at least a stop and a half of underexposure held detail. Wedding shooters who rated it at 100 in mixed reception light got consistently clean negatives.
Fuji sold NPS 160 in 35mm, 120, 220, and sheet sizes including 4x5, 8x10, 9x12 cm, and 13x18 cm. The sheet product served studio portrait work in Japan and parts of Europe where 8x10 portraiture still ran through the late 1990s. The 2004 transition to Pro 160S tightened grain and shifted slightly warmer.
Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second meter reading lands near 35 seconds at the negative. For studio portrait work, the threshold almost never came up. For interior architectural assignments where some pros pressed it into service, the gentle correction was easy to trust.
How the app handles this stock
- Box speed: ISO 160. Picker exposes pull/push chips so you can shoot it at any speed you want and the meter follows.
- Reciprocity: Above one second the app raises metered time to the power of 1.10.
- Expired film: if you load an old roll, set the expiry year and storage in the app and the ISO scales for you. Color negative decay rates are baked in.