P: Improved Fuji X-Trans Support?

Wonder why they didn't ask me, the topic creator? Or why they didn't publicly ask everyone else participating in this forum? Or even the general X-Trans community. God knows there are enough forum posts, blog posts and examples on the web.

Contacting you secretly doesn't do much for customer confidence.

Surely it would be more beneficial if they asked the wider community for examples / files / feedback and made a statement as to whether it was an issue they were willing to work on or not.

I am testing the new release of Iridient Developer against Lightroom's latest release.

Here is a good example that shows how natural the Iridient version appears when compared to the Lighroom output. The same level of diference is present when comparing to Capture 1 etc.

In all fairness to Adobe, the RAW does match the Fuji JPEG quite well, but comparing the two it's easy to see why Lightroom is labeled as the worst software for Fuji X-Trans RAW files. Adobe customers are clearly losing details and getting an unnatural look.

Note these are default settings - with increased sharpening the difference is more pronounced, it simply exaggerates the issue.

Please buy Iridient Digital (Iridient Digital - http://iridientdigital.com) and integrate their raw conversion for Fuji x-trans into lightroom. That will solve most of our (fuji users) problems with your software. Thanks.

Guys, i totally fell in love with Capture One!

The X-Trans Sensor has beautiful colors, we all know that. As you know, i was testing a lot of raw converters last weekend (see my earlier post). i played a lot with all the capture one settings and observed that beautiful natural colors that no other raw converter can produce!

i am falling in love more and more...

beside this, i discovered another raw converter, worth taking a closer look at:

Cyberlink PhotoDirector.

Yeah, i know what you are about to say... but take a look at it. The Image Quality is very, VERY close to Aperture from Apple. I guess, Cyberlink uses the Apple RAW Converter. Images are much the same, just the handling with noise is better at PhotoDirector. That app is under developing, apple stopped developing Aperture a long time ago.

The Latest Version (6) you can buy both for Mac and PC.

Version (4) is even for free, fully working.

http://hukd.mydealz.de/freebies/cyber...

It works very Solid with X-Trans Sensors. The Image Quality is pretty good, eye in eye with Aperture.

I agree with mike-photos. A RAW Converter should do its job. Converting RAW as good as possible. Everything else, is a Bonus.

true word, bro!

Absolutely right! Image quality is the most important feature.

+1. Of course Lightroom has great features, but it's a RAW processing product, and image quality is THE PRIME FEATURE. Make other features sub-par, but not this!

Thank you for sharing that with this community. It prompted me to download RawTherapee and wow, I knew the postings had shown an advantage but when you see your own images that you created realizing these results it made me realize how far off Lightroom needs to progress with the X-trans files. I feel a need to communicate this with other Fuji shooters and wag my finger at Adobe. I didn't know how much was being left on the table by Adobe.

Lightroom need to be improved, no question, but neither C1 nor Photo Ninja are all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips.

Anyone using a Wacom tablet with Photo Ninja already knows that the Wacom mouse won't work with this program. This is a deal killer for me. (It's a weakness of the software used to write the program.) Beyond that, PN has really inferior highlight recovery. My very first image test involved a backlit river. PN created all kinds of artifacts on the specular highlights across the surface of the water. LR handled the issue flawlessly. The developer acknowledged both of these as known issues.

Capture One is a nice bit of software and does many things very well but it isn't perfect either. It has the same (though less severe) issue with highlight recovery as Photo Ninja. And there are a number of features in the software that are not implemented for X-Trans sensors. Edge detection was one that they were still said to be working on when C1Pro 8 was first released. There are other omissions that the developer has said they do not plan to implement for X-Tran ever due to the amount of work it would take. That, to me, sounds like a less-than-complete commitment to Fuji users.

I have read nothing that suggests Adobe has committed to improving X-Trans conversions but I have read an Adobe employee confirm that this issue is at the very top of the list of requests they get for improvements. That leaves me at least somewhat hopeful that LR6 will improve the situation. That said, if it comes in the form of a new develop process, anyone who hasn't succumbed to Adobe's rental scheme and is still using PS CS6 will probably no longer realize any benefit from exporting out of LR6 as a smart object.

LR offers an advantage no other product does in terms of its integration with PS. You can maintain a complete end-to-end non-destructive editing workflow by exporting from LR to PS as a smart object. That is aside from the issues of catalog management created by using different processors—not that it can't be done but what a hassle.

Now if one didn't use a managed catalog, didn't employ smart objects, and maintained master files as "developed" TIF files (for example), then switching between processors would be a trivial thing. There is nothing wrong with this workflow if it works for you but it is less sophisticated and less flexible than the former.