Lomography Purple 400

Trees go pink. Skies acquire a teal stripe. Faces shift toward lavender. That is what Lomography Purple does, and it is the entire reason anybody loads it. The Lomography catalog has a handful of effect films, and Purple 400 sells more rolls than the rest of them combined.

People reach for the Aerochrome comparison. It is not Aerochrome. Aerochrome was a false-color infrared E-6 stock built to flag living vegetation in aerial surveys; its color shifts came from an infrared-sensitive layer that turned chlorophyll into magenta. Purple 400 is conventional C-41 color negative with the dye layers rearranged so that the visible-light response itself is twisted. The aesthetic overlap is real in forests and gardens; the underlying chemistry is different in every way that matters technically.

Rate it at box speed and overexpose a third of a stop if the scene already has a lot of green. The extra exposure lifts the color shifts and softens the contrast, which generally reads better in finished prints. Underexposure tightens the magentas but coarsens the grain in ways that feel cheap rather than deliberate. Rate it at 200 in flat shade for the most controlled result.

Skies on Purple 400 in sunlight come back a pale teal that almost reads as faded slide film. Skin tones in portrait work go variously pink, magenta, or lavender depending on light source and exposure; this is not a portrait stock unless the portrait is meant to look surreal. Photographers who buy this film once tend to buy it again, but always in measured quantities, alongside something neutral to balance the project.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. Most Purple shooting happens at fast shutter speeds in good outdoor light, so the math rarely comes up, but at sunrise or sunset it kicks in.