Fuji Raw Files and the XF1

Darren Bonner

Regular
Location
Poole, UK
Name
Darren
I took some photo's of some Swans the other day with the XF1 in Jpeg. I did some editing in Lightroom mainly reducing the highlights, but I still had some blown highlights. In the previous thread, Grebeman suggest to shoot in RAW. I had some reservations as I read RAW files are not that good on this camera and did have a go once and the files were very noisey. Perhaps I was on Medium mode (6MP) and auto iso.
Today I had another go. The sky was overcast, but shooting the Swans was more difficult. The swans looked over exposed on the LCD, even when I dialed down the exposure, but the rest of the scene looked too dark. I set the file size to large (12mp) and ISO 100. Other waterfowl showed themselves too so I took photo's of them too.
when I looked at the RAW files on the big screen, they looked flat, really flat, but they responded really well when I processed them in Lightroom.

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Swan by Darren Bonner, on Flickr

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Swans by Darren Bonner, on Flickr

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Ducks by Darren Bonner, on Flickr

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Here comes the swans by Darren Bonner, on Flickr

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Coot and Morhen by Darren Bonner, on Flickr

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Swans by Darren Bonner, on Flickr

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Swans by Darren Bonner, on Flickr
 
Looks like you figured it out well enough. I notice on the next-to-last shot, "swans," there's enough chromatic aberration to be visible at this smallish size. If you look at the left and right sides of the foreground swan's neck, you can see the left side has blue fringe and the other side has red. That happens to me some with the X100 and raw, unless I correct it manually. Do you have that option?
 
David Taylor-Hughes who used to contribute to this forum under the name Soundimageplus still write a daily blog SOUNDIMAGEPLUS and although he's now very much into Sony A7 a A7r cameras also uses Fuji and highly recommends PhotoNinja for it's ability with Fuji raw files, better than any other raw editor he has used.

I have used PhotoNinja for raw files from other cameras, as editors go it does rely on a lot of manual manipulation but it might be worth your while in downloading a trial version and see if it improves the results obtained from your raw files.

Barrie
 
Thanks for the advice, I did have a go at reducing the chromatic aberration on a couple of the photo's above and there was a significant improvement.
And thanks for the link to the blog, I learnt something from that. I'll have a look into Photo Ninja.
 
Hey awesome! Glad it worked. Like I said, I sometimes have it hit me with the X100, and before I knew why it didn't look "right" to me, I just couldn't get the crispness I was used to with jpg's SOOC. Then I found the CA sliders, and BingoBango.
 
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