Send Recipes Straight to Your Sony — Over a Cable

Copying Settings by Hand Is Over

A Creative Look recipe is a dozen numbers: the look itself, white balance and its shift, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, fade, sharpness and its range, clarity. Until now, using someone else's recipe meant holding your phone next to the camera and typing all of it into the menu, one item at a time — then doing it again on your second body, and again the next time you wanted to switch back.

AlphaLuma now writes recipes into the camera for you, over an ordinary USB cable.

How It Works

Set your camera's USB Connection Mode to Remote Shooting — some bodies label it PC Remote.
Connect the camera to your iPhone with a data cable.
Open any recipe and tap Send Recipe to Camera.

That is the whole flow. No Wi-Fi, no pairing, no account, no desktop software.

Two Ways to Land a Recipe

Into a Custom Look slot — the recipe is stored in the camera, so you can switch to it any time from the camera's own menu, long after you have unplugged.
Straight onto your current settings — for when you want to shoot with it right now.

Once connected, the app shows the model name, the battery level, and how many Custom Look slots that particular body has. All of it is read live from the camera; nothing is assumed and nothing is hard-coded.

What Happens Quietly in the Background

Writing settings into someone's camera is not a place to be clever, so most of the work went into being careful.

You see every change before it happens. The app lists each setting it is about to write, and sends nothing until you confirm.
Picture Profile is handled for you. An active Picture Profile locks Creative Look out. The app notices and switches it off first, instead of failing with an error you would have to decode.
Slot counts come from your camera. Different bodies expose different numbers of Custom Look slots, so the app reads yours rather than guessing.
Interruptions are stated plainly. If a write is cut short — a cable pulled, a camera falling asleep — the app tells you that the parameters already written stay on the camera and the rest are untouched. Reconnect and import again; repeating is safe.
White balance is treated as what it is. WB is a global camera setting rather than part of a look slot, so it is only applied when you choose to apply a recipe to your current settings.

Which Cameras Work

Your camera needs Creative Look in its menu. We have verified the feature on the α7 V, α7 IV, α7C II, α7CR, α7R V and ZV-E1.

Bodies from roughly 2021 and earlier use the older Creative Style, whose parameters do not correspond one to one, so they cannot receive recipes. If your camera is not in the list above, that does not mean it will not work — plug it in and the app will tell you after it reads the camera. When a body is not supported, nothing is written to it.

What You Need

A data cable. Charge-only cables are the single most common reason a connection never appears.
iPhone 15 and later connect USB-C to USB-C directly. iPhone 14 and earlier need Apple's Lightning to USB Camera Adapter.
A memory card in the camera — without one it will not enter remote shooting.
No other app holding the camera. Creators' App or Imaging Edge will occupy the remote channel, so quit them first.

Menu paths for different models, and what to check when nothing connects, are in our Help Center under Send recipes to your camera over USB.

Why a Cable

Wireless would be more elegant, and we looked at it seriously. A cable connects instantly, does not drain the battery, does not drop halfway through a write, and behaves the same on every body that supports it. For something that takes fifteen seconds and then gets unplugged again, that trade was an easy one.

Tell Us How It Goes

If a camera will not connect, or a recipe lands differently than you expected, we want to hear about it — with the model name, because that is the part that lets us fix it.

Email: sonyalphainfo@126.com
Reddit: r/SonyFilmRecipes
Instagram: @sony.recipes

— The AlphaLuma Team