Fujifilm Superia Reala 100

Fuji introduced Reala in 1989 as the first color negative film with a fourth cyan-sensitive emulsion layer, an answer to a real industrial problem: conventional three-layer films pick up the green spike from office fluorescents and gymnasium tubes, and the resulting skin tones tilt sickly under any mixed-light scenario a wedding photographer might actually meet. The cyan layer reads what the green-sensitive layer cannot distinguish, and the print stage backs out the cast. Fujifilm rolled the same fourth-layer architecture into the rest of the Pro line over the next decade. Reala just got there first.

When Fuji folded the stock into the Superia consumer line in the late 1990s and renamed it Superia Reala 100, the emulsion stayed essentially the same. The packaging changed. The price tier slid. Wedding shooters who had built their reception-hall workflow around the original Reala kept loading it because the fourth layer kept saving them. Skin under tungsten warmed in a controllable way. Skin under fluorescent did not turn green. That predictability was the entire reason to choose this stock over cheaper Fujicolor 100.

The color signature beyond the fluorescent rescue is on the cool side of neutral. Blues stay blue. Greens sit closer to forest than to emerald. Saturation is muted next to Kodak Ektar 100 and warmer-balanced next to Pro 160S. Grain at ISO 100 is tight enough that 35mm scans hold up at 16x20.

Fuji discontinued the 35mm in 2012 and the 120 in 2013, blaming declining sales as digital took the wedding market. Freezer-stock still works if it was cold from new; warm-stored Reala from the 2000s tends to shift magenta.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second on the standard curve, so a 30-second metered reading climbs to roughly 60 seconds at the negative. For interior fluorescent work where Reala earns its keep, exposures rarely run that long, but for window-lit still life on a tripod the math is worth doing.