Lightroom 4.4 bug with new X-Trans handling algorithms. It looks like the blue channel is clipping in some instances, severely distorting handling of highlights. Here's an example:
I don' t know as this is a bug with X-Trans, I think it is just a problem with the Adobe Standard profile for many cameras. This photo happens to be with an X-Trans camera is all.
Here is a oversaturated-blue example with a Nikon D7000: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/thr...
Of course with Nikon cameras, Adobe supplied so-called Camera-match profiles to better mimic the camera-JPG response. The Fuji cameras have no such extra attention given.
For the night street-scene photo, the "page five" solution only works on it because there isn't much other legit blue in the photo, otherwise that blue would be very desaturated.
If camera calibration is suspected, why not make your own camera profile? The shipped profiles are made with a small subset of all the possible responses a model can have, and sometimes a specific body can be at the other end of that bell-curve.
It being an unrelated problem that'll be fixed is comforting.
Can anyone shed some light on what this other problem actually is, and an interim way of resolving it without having to do extensive per-photo colour manipulation? Is there a general all-purpose preset for the X-E1 that can resolve it?
Needless to say this is a significant issue for any RAW work, especially with a lot of my recent photos being night photos with lots of blue.
"...an interim way of resolving it without having to do extensive per-photo colour manipulation?"
How about not blowing the raw channels? Since you are shooting at high ISO, this is easy - just use a lower ISO and some negative exposure compensation of the same amount. For example, if you want to shoot at ISO 1600 EC=0, shoot at ISO 800 EC=-1 or ISO 400 EC=-2 instead.
I'm going to give up trying to work around this issue because numerous experiments with Lightroom settings hasn't helped. Lee Jay's suggestion may work for future photos, but that's no help for the dozens of photos I've already got and I don't particularly fancy using awkward shooting settings to resolve something no other RAW processor is having difficulty with.
An additional curiosity which I assume is related to this: reducing the black level *even by a tiny amount* causes the image to become covered in bold blue:
That "bright blue" is the black-clipping indicator color that you have turned on using the little triangle at the left of the histogram. Click the triangle, again, to turn it off.
Ah, very good. Must have caught that by accident, good to know.
One thing I will note is that I was able to minimise this problem by pulling the saturation of all channels down in camera calibration to -25, then pushing the overall saturation of the photo up by the same amount or a little more. Not sure why that helps, but it does.
The problem is that there's an underlying colour balance issue that can't be fixed so easily. Bold tones that should be purple or magenta are coming out blue, and bold tones that should be aqua are coming out blue. I've fiddled with the hues of the camera calibration but can't find something that gets it all right like the camera's JPEGs do.