voxivoid/recipe-lab-sony-pmca

Film simulations and camera looks for the Sony cameras that support PlayMemories Camera Apps, stored in the camera itself.
_{· Website · Download the app · See every recipe}

_{Recipe Lab is built and maintained by one person. Tips pay for keeping it maintained, for building new features, and for buying the cameras it has to be tested on — I currently only own a Sony a6000.}

Contents

• What it is
• The recipes
• Compatibility
  • Cameras that run PlayMemories apps
  • Cameras that cannot run camera apps
• Installing
• How to use
• Custom recipes
  • Making one
  • The edit buttons
  • Rename, delete, favourite
  • Sharing
• What it changes
• Uninstalling
• Troubleshooting
• For developers
• Credits

Recipe Lab is a small app that runs on the camera itself — on Sony cameras that support PlayMemories Camera Apps, such as the A6000, A6300, A6500 and A7 II (see Compatibility). It comes with 76 colour recipes that recreate the looks of other cameras — Fuji film simulations, Ricoh GR image controls, Leica, Hasselblad, Canon and Nikon colour, Sony's newer Creative Looks — and of classic film stocks from Kodak, Fuji, Cinestill, Agfa and Ilford. You can also make your own, and share them.

You turn the wheel, watch the live image change, press a button. From then on the camera shoots that way in every mode, photo and video, with the app closed. Turn it off and on, it is still there.

Honest note. The A6000 has no Picture Profile menu and cannot store tone curves. Every recipe is built only from what this camera can keep: Creative Style, saturation, contrast, sharpness, white balance, exposure bias, Picture Effect and one hidden colour setting Sony never exposed. So these are approximations of a look, not copies of another brand's colour science.

See every recipe on the same subject → — 77 frames, one scene, one exposure, straight out of the camera.

Recipes marked JPEG only in the app (Acros +R, Tri-X 1600, GR Retro, GR Hi-Contrast B&W, Sony SH, Polaroid) are built on a Picture Effect because, against the reference frames, its tone curve gets closer than Creative Style can; everything else stays Creative Style on purpose.

Not included, because the camera simply cannot do them: log profiles (S-Log, V-Log, Blackmagic Film, Cinelike D) and tinted black & white (selenium, cyanotype). Sony's camcorder Cinematone gamma exists in the firmware but the A6000's camera layer neither lists nor accepts it, so that door is closed too.

Recipe Lab has no model check in it, and every Sony body that runs PlayMemories apps has the same settings store — so it should install and work beyond the A6000.

The catch: the setting IDs were found on an A6000 and may sit elsewhere on another body, so a recipe could land in the wrong place. A camera gets a ✅ only once someone has stored a recipe on it and power-cycled the camera.

Tried one? File a compatibility report. Failures are as useful as successes.

✅ someone has run it on that body · ❔ app-capable, nobody has reported back yet

Two more are unclear: the RX100 II and the original RX10 had Sony's app store, but are missing from the installer's device table, so even the install is untested.

App-capable but pointless: the QX lens cameras (ILCE-QX1, DSC-QX10/QX30/QX100), with no screen or wheel to drive the app, and the Handycams and action cams, with no Creative Style to write.

Sony's last app-capable bodies are the ones above, from late 2016 — the A6500 and the A99 II. Everything since has signed firmware and no MENU → Application, so nothing can be installed on it: not this app, not Sony's own store, which closed in 2021.

…and everything released since. The menu is the test: no MENU → Application on your camera, no app — so reports of Recipe Lab running on an A6400 or similar are mistaken.

Takes about ten minutes, once. You need the camera, its USB cable, a memory card and a computer (Windows, Mac or Linux).

Rather watch it done? u/wemax141 made a video walkthrough:

1. Get the installer tool. It is called Sony-PMCA-RE, made by ma1co. It puts apps on Sony cameras the same way Sony's own app store did before it closed.

• Windows: download pmca-gui.exe from the releases page. Nothing to install, just run it.

• macOS: the same page has a macOS build, less tested than the Windows one. Close anything that holds USB devices — Photos, Dropbox, Google Drive — or it takes the camera first.

• Linux, or if the binary misbehaves: Python 3 and libusb, then in a terminal:

  git clone https://github.com/ma1co/Sony-PMCA-RE.git
  cd Sony-PMCA-RE
  pip install -r requirements.txt
  

2. Download the app: RecipeLab.apk — that link always serves the newest release, so it is the one to use. The releases page has older versions and the version-stamped copies.

3. Prepare the camera. Battery charged, memory card inside. In the camera menu go to Setup (toolbox icon) → USB Connection and choose Mass Storage. Turn the camera on and plug it into the computer. The camera screen should say USB Mode.

4. Install.

• GUI: open pmca-gui.exe → Install app from file → choose RecipeLab.apk → wait.

• Terminal, from the Sony-PMCA-RE folder (Linux: put sudo in front):

  python pmca-console.py install -f RecipeLab.apk
  

The camera will flicker, go black and switch modes a couple of times on its own. That is normal — do not press anything. After about a minute the computer prints Task completed successfully. Go by the computer. The camera is usually left on its own Application Download / Connecting via USB... screen, which looks stuck and is not.

5. Unplug, then turn the camera off and on. The app now lives under MENU → Application → Application List → Recipe Lab.

Open Recipe Lab from the Application List. The live view shows the look. The panel at the bottom names the recipe.

The basics

• Turn the wheel to change recipe. The live view updates at once.
• Press centre to pick it. The camera keeps it — every mode, even with the app closed.
• Press MENU to leave.

Keys

Badges

Change a value

• Go down to the chips. centre a chip. up / down changes it. centre again to finish.
• It is only a preview until you choose.
• Buttons appear under the chips: Apply, Save as new, Discard — and Save on your own recipes.
• See Custom recipes.

Brand list — Fn, or hold MENU → Browse recipes

• Left column: Favourites, Custom, then the brands. Right column: their recipes.
• left / right switches column. centre picks.

Favourites

• Hold centre on a recipe. A star appears.
• They wait under Favourites, in the order you marked them.

Menu — hold MENU

• Browse recipes · New recipe · Panel visibility · Language · Reset settings · About · Developer.
• New recipe saves the camera's current settings as a custom recipe.
• Languages: Auto, English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, 한국어, Tiếng Việt.

Keep your own looks next to the built-in ones. They live on the memory card, under Custom in the brand list.

• From a recipe: change its chips, then press Save as new in the buttons under the chips.
• From the camera: hold MENU → New recipe saves the camera's current settings.
• A keyboard opens to name it. Just type — it replaces Untitled. OK saves.

Change any chip and buttons appear under the chips. Press down to reach them.

Leaving a changed recipe asks first: Discard or Cancel.

• In the brand list, hold MENU on a custom recipe → Rename or Delete.
• Hold centre → favourite, as on any recipe.

• Each recipe is a small YAML file in RECIPES on the card — e.g. RECIPES/GOLDENHO.YML.
• Export: connect the camera as Mass Storage. Copy the files out.
• Import: copy a file into RECIPES. Keep its name short: up to 8 letters, then .YML. Reopen the app.
• Edit them in any text editor. Each line lists its allowed values:

name: "Golden Hour"
style: portrait              # standard vivid neutral portrait …
saturation: -1               # -3 .. +3
white-balance: 5600K         # auto, keep, or 2500K .. 9900K
exposure: +0.7               # -5.0 .. +5.0 in thirds

• A file with a bad value is skipped. The app says which and why.
• Formatting the card deletes them. Back up RECIPES first.

Full file format: docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.

Only camera settings you could set by hand: Creative Style and its saturation, contrast and sharpness sliders, white balance and its fine-tune, exposure compensation, DRO, Picture Effect. No firmware is touched, nothing is unlocked.

Picture Effect recipes (marked JPEG only) behave like the menu item does: the camera ignores Creative Style while one is on, and it only works with Quality = JPEG — set to RAW or RAW+JPEG, the camera drops the effect silently.

Quality therefore follows you rather than being dictated by a recipe. The Factory recipe starts as whatever the camera is set to, and every Creative Style recipe uses that. Change it any time with the QUALITY chip. Only when a recipe needs JPEG and you are on RAW does the app ask:

Quality: RAW+JPG → JPG Fine — JPEG is needed to apply this recipe

Cancel changes nothing.

Is it permanent? The look stays until you change it — on purpose, that is what makes it work in every mode without the app. It is not permanent in the sense of damage. Undo it any time, three ways:

• In the app: pick Factory (first in Sony), or hold TRASH / hold MENU → Reset settings and confirm.
• In the menus: set Creative Style back to Standard 0 / 0 / 0 and White Balance to Auto.
• Or use the camera's own Setup → Setting Reset → Camera Settings Reset.

Removing the app. MENU → Application → Application Management → Manage and Remove → Recipe Lab. This does not put the colour settings back, so undo the look first and remove the app after.

Worth knowing:

• The preview inside the app is temporary; closing the app removes it. Only what you picked stays.
• Removing the app leaves your custom recipes on the memory card, in RECIPES; formatting the card does not.
• Built and tested on the A6000 with firmware 3.21. Several other bodies have been reported working — see Compatibility — but on anything still marked ❔ there, compare what the chips show with your menus before picking a recipe.

The common questions — RAW files, damage, LUTs, newer bodies — are in the FAQ.

The reverse-engineering notes — source layout, the settings-store ID map, the exit rule, live-preview parameters, key scan codes and how to build — live in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.

To contribute, read docs/CONTRIBUTING.md first: branch naming, commit format and the release flow are all enforced by CI.

Author: André Domingues (voxivoid) — reverse engineering of the A6000 settings store (backup IDs, PP flag behaviour, colour-matrix measurement), the app, the recipes, the icon.

Huge thanks to ma1co. None of this would exist without his years of work reverse engineering Sony's PlayMemories camera platform:

• Sony-PMCA-RE — the app-install channel, the updater shell used to dump this camera's firmware and settings, and fwtool.
• OpenMemories-Platform — the backup driver / OSAL bindings this app links against (vendored here as a git submodule).
• OpenMemories-Tweak and OpenMemories-Framework — reference for Backup_read/write, the ScalarInput key codes and the CameraEx API.
• The earlier nex-hack community research he built on and kept documented.

He figured out how these cameras work, documented it openly and licensed it permissively — this project just stands on that.

Thanks also to Veres Deni Alex. His Sony film-simulation recipes and the side-by-side reference frames on his site were the inspiration and the benchmark for many of the looks here (Kodak, Fuji, Cinestill, Ilford, Cinema…). The values in this app are re-derived for what the A6000 can store and are not his recipes.

License: MIT (this repository). OpenMemories-Platform: MIT, © 2017 ma1co.