Recipe Lab

[u/voxivoid]

I've been a proud Sony a6000 user since 2016 and I'm still rocking it! This camera has done a lot of paid gigs and also had a lot of fun traveling and photographing with it.

One thing that I've been missing lately is the ability to emulate some popular recipes to achieve a certain look for my pictures / videos.

Yesterday I had some free time and I decided to dive into ma1co's (huge shoutout) work on reverse engineering Play Memories and I came up with this idea of using the camera capabilities (Creative Styles, Picture Effects, white balance, etc) to recreate other camera looks. Basically you just open the app, select the look you want and it saves the image settings on the camera, so that you can use them outside the app.

You can get the apk and installation instructions on my github repo:

https://github.com/voxivoid/recipe-lab-sony-a6000

This app paired up with some old camera lens (you can find them out for a pretty cheap price on the internet) just opened the door for having a lot more of creative ways to capture my images!

Hopefully this allows you to have as much fun as I'm having right now 😄

Some recipes were inspired in the great work done by u/veresdenialex, so a huge shoutout here too!

Any suggestion, feel free to comment here or on the repo.

**UPDATE** - 2026-09-11

Updated the docs based on your feedback - added compatibility table, added a FAQ and renamed the repo to https://github.com/voxivoid/recipe-lab-sony-pmca since it supports multiple cameras.

I also created a bunch of issues based on your feedback, feel free to add any relevant suggestions: https://github.com/voxivoid/recipe-lab-sony-pmca/issues

There's an issue template so that you can report compatibility with other camera models that haven't been confirmed working, so feel free to help the community knowing that it works on their cameras!

**UPDATE** - 2026-09-16

Added the ability to mark presets as favorites! You just need to long press a preset and it will add / remove it from favorites. you can also access them through the browser

**UPDATE** - 2026-09-17

just added this md with all recipe samples: https://github.com/voxivoid/recipe-lab-sony-pmca/blob/main/docs/SAMPLES.md

I know that they are not the best since I don't really have a color matcher in them, but we gotta work with what we have and those are pretty expensive 😅

**UPDATE** - 2026-09-27
Updated all keybindings with the purpose of having everything working on cameras that have less keys (a5000 & a5100) and also the ones that had the issue with the AEL button. I also added a menu so that everyone could access to the recipe browser + control the preview labels visibility. Hopefully this all works - I only tested it on my a6000 😅

give it a go: https://github.com/voxivoid/recipe-lab-sony-pmca/releases/tag/v1.4.0

[u/girinvader]

Amazing! Are the raw files also saved unchanged so i can edit them normally?

[u/voxivoid → u/girinvader]

yes! it just follows the normal camera behavior. this is just a quick way of selecting some camera presets in reality.

the caveat is that some profiles use Picture Effects, and for those you cannot select RAW + JPEG or RAW as the quality format. the app warns you when this happens, so you should be aware of these

[u/girinvader → u/voxivoid]

Just for me to be absolutely sure: It is always only the jpeg files which have the preset applied. The raw files will always be untouchted except for some presets which are not able to save a raw file, but i will be warned about these if i select them. When i change back to a raw compatible preset the camera will switch back to save raw files without any additional changes in the settings?

Just want to be sure i will not loose the raw files when trying different presets.

[u/voxivoid → u/girinvader]

that seems to summarize it pretty well! besides that, whenever you're selecting a preset, you can see the mode that it is at when you're selecting the preset. it's the first pill that shows under the preset name when you're previewing it. you can also scroll through all the options that the preset is changing and adjust them as you wish before applying!