Ricoh GR III Custom User Modes Explained: How to Set Up U1, U2 and U3

Every film recipe guide ends with the same sentence: "save this to a User mode." It's good advice, and almost nobody follows through properly. The U1, U2 and U3 positions on the Ricoh GR III mode dial are the difference between a camera you fight with and a camera that's already configured for the shot before you've raised it to your eye. Get them right and you can move from a warm daylight colour recipe to a high-ISO black-and-white night setup with a single flick of your thumb.

This guide covers how User modes actually work on the Ricoh GR III — what gets stored, the exact menu path, the naming and recall system most owners never find, and three practical setups you can copy today.

What a Ricoh GR III User Mode Actually Stores

A User mode is not just a colour preset. It's a snapshot of essentially your whole shooting configuration, which is why it's so powerful and why people get tripped up by it.

When you save a User mode on the Ricoh GR III, it captures:

• Exposure mode — P, Av, Tv, TAv or M, saved independently per slot
• Aperture, shutter speed and ISO, including your ISO Auto range and minimum shutter speed
• Exposure compensation
• Image Control settings — the full recipe: saturation, hue, contrast, highlight and shadow contrast, sharpness, clarity, toning, grain
• White balance and white balance compensation
• Focus mode — including Snap distance and AF area
• Crop mode (28mm, 35mm, 50mm) and aspect ratio
• File format — JPEG, RAW or RAW+
• Drive mode, ND filter, macro and flash settings

That last group matters more than people expect. A User mode isn't "a look" — it's a whole shooting posture. That's why the best setups are built around situations rather than around individual recipes.

The Exact Menu Path to Save a User Mode

Here's the part that confuses new owners: you don't save a User mode from the mode dial. You save it from the Customise Settings menu, and the dial position is just a pointer.

1. Configure the camera completely first. Set your exposure mode, ISO Auto range, Image Control values, white balance, focus mode, crop, file format — everything. What's on the camera right now is what gets frozen.
2. Press MENU and navigate to Customise Settings > Save Settings.
3. Choose an empty box to save into.
4. Give it a name. Do this. "Gold 200 Daylight" tells you something at 7am on a cold street; "Box 3" does not.
5. Assign it to U1, U2 or U3.
6. Turn the mode dial to that position and confirm the name appears on screen.

Pro tip: the GR III stores six saved configurations even though the dial only exposes three. Use Customise Settings > Recall to swap which saved box is currently mapped to U1, U2 or U3. This is the single most useful thing in this article — you effectively get a small library of setups, with three of them "loaded" at any time. Seasonal recipes, a travel kit, a dedicated monochrome setup: keep them all saved and rotate the three you need this week.

The Behaviour That Catches Everyone Out

Any adjustment you make while shooting in a User mode is temporary. Bump exposure compensation to +0.7, switch to Tv, drop into 50mm crop — the moment you turn the dial away and come back, the Ricoh GR III restores the settings exactly as you saved them.

This is a feature, not a bug. It means a User mode is a guaranteed known state: whatever chaos you got into during the last shot, turning the dial resets you to a clean, predictable baseline. It's the reason experienced GR III shooters trust the U positions in fast street situations.

The flip side: if you tweak a recipe in the field and decide the new version is better, you have to go back to Customise Settings > Save Settings and overwrite the box. Nothing is saved automatically. Make a habit of it — a good adjustment you don't save is one you'll have to rediscover.

Three User Mode Setups Worth Copying

You have three live slots. The most effective split is by light and intent, not by film stock. Here's a configuration that covers the vast majority of real shooting days.

U1 — Daylight Colour (the default walkaround)

Your everyday mode. Fast, forgiving, and ready the instant you pull the camera out of your pocket.

• Exposure mode: P (or Av at f/5.6 if you prefer control over depth of field)
• ISO: Auto 100–1600, minimum shutter 1/125s
• Image Control: a warm colour negative recipe — our Kodak Gold 200 preset lives here permanently for a lot of shooters
• White balance: Multi Auto, or a fixed Kelvin value if you want consistency across a set
• Focus: Snap at 2m, or AF with Auto Area
• Crop: 28mm (full frame of view)
• File format: RAW+ so you keep a safety net

This is the mode you leave the camera in when you put it away. Whatever happens tomorrow, you start from something sane.

U2 — Low Light and Night

The setup that actually gets used, because reconfiguring for night in the dark is miserable.

• Exposure mode: Av at f/2.8, or Tv at 1/60s if you're shooting moving subjects
• ISO: Auto 100–6400, minimum shutter 1/60s
• Image Control: a higher-contrast recipe that handles mixed artificial light — see our night photography settings guide for the full breakdown
• White balance: fixed around 3800K to keep tungsten warmth honest rather than letting Auto neutralise it
• Focus: Snap at 2.5m — AF struggles in low contrast and low light, and zone focusing doesn't care
• ND filter: Off

The fixed white balance is the detail that separates a good night mode from a mediocre one. Auto white balance under neon and sodium lighting fights the exact colour cast that makes night frames interesting.

U3 — Black and White

Monochrome deserves its own slot because shooting it well means previewing it. When the LCD shows you tone instead of colour, you start composing differently.

• Exposure mode: P or Av
• ISO: Auto 200–3200 — grain is welcome here
• Image Control: Monochrome, tuned to a stock you like. The Tri-X 400 recipe for grit, the T-Max 400 recipe for clean detail, or our Dramatic Monochrome preset for high contrast
• Filter Effect: Yellow as a default — it handles skies and skin more naturally than no filter at all
• Focus: Snap at 2m
• File format: RAW+ (the RAW keeps colour in reserve if you change your mind)

Getting More From Your Three Slots

A few habits that make the system work harder:

Match crop mode to the slot. If you keep a 35mm or 50mm crop setup for tighter framing, put it in its own User mode rather than toggling crop by hand. Crop is stored per slot, so this is free.

Standardise your Snap distance across modes. Nothing undermines zone focusing faster than a Snap distance that changes when you switch modes. Pick 2m or 2.5m and use it everywhere unless a mode has a genuine reason to differ.

Name modes by situation, not by film. "Night Neon" beats "CineStill 800T" because you choose a mode based on the light in front of you, not on a film stock you're trying to remember.

Rotate the hidden three seasonally. Load a winter or travel configuration into the dial when you need it and park the ones you're not using. The Recall menu takes ten seconds.

Re-save after every real improvement. If a tweak survives a full day of shooting, it belongs in the box.

Final Thoughts

The Ricoh GR III is designed around speed — pocket, power on, shoot. User modes are what make that promise real past the first frame. Three dial positions, six saved configurations, and a system that guarantees you always start from a known state. Spend twenty minutes setting them up once and you'll stop thinking about menus entirely, which is exactly the point.

If you're building recipes to fill those slots, our preset collection covers film emulations from Kodak Gold to Tri-X with every Image Control value spelled out — copy them straight into a User mode and you're shooting in under two minutes. New to the process? Start with our guide on how to apply GR III presets.