Lomography LomoChrome Turquoise XR

Lomography released the original LomoChrome Turquoise in 2014 in a single batch of about 5,000 rolls. It sold out almost immediately. For the next several years it traded on eBay at multiples of its original price while users hoarded freezer stock and waited. A reformulated version, marketed as the 2021 formula, finally arrived in late 2022 in 35mm, 120, and 110.

The trick of the film is a color-channel swap. Warm tones flip to blue, blue tones flip to gold, greens push toward saturated emerald. A standard portrait under tungsten light comes back looking like a still from a Wong Kar-Wai film. A beach scene comes back with golden sand and turquoise sky reversed against your expectations. The shifts are not subtle and they are not consistent across the frame either; the response curves of the three layers do not move linearly with exposure, so highlights and shadows shift differently within the same shot.

ISO is rated 100 to 400, with most shooters settling around 200 to 400. The film responds best to clean direct sun. Overcast flattens both the shift and the contrast, and underexposure gives muddy frames where the color magic stops working. Meter for the shadows in bright light and let the highlights ride. That is the inverse of the Velvia approach.

Grain is moderate for an experimental stock, comparable to the LomoChrome Purple but generally finer than Metropolis. The 2021 formula appears to coat slightly thinner than the original, though the comparison is hard to verify because clean original stock is now essentially gone.

Available in 35mm, 120, and 110 in current production. No sheet sizes.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, so a 30-second meter reading runs about a minute on the film. The shifts already misbehave in low light, and reciprocity is one more variable to track if you are pushing exposures past ten seconds.