The noise is reduced if the image is correctly exposed, but if a couple of stops too dark, it is very evident. They’re watermarked though, and I must ask that you don’t post them or share them online.This is interesting, as I've recently experienced this, but not originally, now my X-T2 has had a replacement sensor (it's a long story, and possibly my fault, but maybe not, but the good news is that those nice people at Fuji replaced it FOC, even if it took them 2 go's!!!) The original sensor was brilliant at LE, but this 'new' sensor often displays noise in the LE images.
Looking at crops on a web page is no way to judge either, so I’ve put a folder of the full res images as Jpegs below for you to download and look at properly. It’s clearly visible, although the last time I said that someone still argued the opposite, but anyway. Having said that, of the seven tested here, two are clearly not good enough yet, and I think that goes beyond personal opinion. Different people will look at these and see different results, and so, that’s why I’m just presenting my findings. I’m often reluctant to say one is better than the other, because in many cases, it’s a matter of how you see things and your own personal opinion. OnOne raw is not good enough at the moment, in my opinion, and Luminar was ok until they updated it and screwed up X-Trans support, but now is not great. Affinity is giving good results too, but the lack of lens correction is an issue. Between Lightroom, Iridient and Capture One, the results are similar, with the differences being in the fine detail. LightroomĪs you can see there is quite a range of results from using the different converters. Note, although the crops below are 1:1 they'll be shrunk slightly to fit into the web page, so click on them to see them at proper pixel for pixel. Another interesting thing is that some converters support lens corrections, and others don’t I had to double check I was actually using the same raw file at one point the results were so different. Each one has a slightly different crop by default, and some include more edge detail than others. One of the things that I was surprised about when doing this experiment was how different the cropping was between all the different converters.
I also didn’t use Iridient X-Transformer because I don’t have the mac version yet, and I didn’t want to go to the hassle of using PC emulation to create a DNG just for this test, but I’ll re-visit this topic when the Mac version is released. Incidentally, I didn’t use Photoshop because Camera Raw is basically the same engine as Lightroom.
I know that there are other applications out there, and if I didn’t include your favourite piece of software, it’s not a snub, I just don’t have it installed right now. I’ll also have a set of full res version that you can download and pixel peep to your hearts content. In each case below I’ll show a scaled down comparison and a 1:1 crop or two. I just processed it to taste in each application.
I did try to reasonably match the overall levels of contrast and so on, wherever possible, but I didn’t spend hours trying to get it exact in each piece of software in order to compare to a control or some such thing, because people don’t work like that in real life. I processed the image in each software as if I was using just that. I know that there are probably lots of holes in this methodology, and that’s because there isn’t really one. Secondly, I’m not doing this as a scientific comparison. However, having said that, in two of the cases, the results are too poor that I feel that it needs to be pointed out that those pieces of software are not suitable for X-Trans files for now. I’m simply going to present the results, offer an opinion as to what I see, and let you decide for yourself. I’m going to try and be objective and non judgemental here. First of all, I know this can be a heated topic, and some people don’t like anything bad said about their favourite piece of software, but that’s not what this is about. As I’ve written so much about it, and as I had an image that I was working on for a real world project, I thought that while I was at it, I should try a whole bunch of different converters and see what kind of results I got.īefore I get into this, a couple of disclaimers. I was processing the image in Lightroom, and I wanted to see what it would look like in different converters. I was recently working on a photo of Dublin’s famous Ha’Penny bridge that I had taken with my X-Pro 2 and an idea came to me.