Sigma Surprising X3F Processing Software

Have been playing around with my new DP2M and from the research I did beforehand it seemed that SPP and Iridient are the only 2 apps that will process X3F files.

Given that Iridient costs and SPP doesn't I was happy to stick with SPP even though it is a bit clunky.

Now, I use Fasttone Image Viewer a lot to quickly scan through folders etc and was looking for a couple of TIFF's exported from SPP so went in to my Sigma folder and to my surprise it showed all the thumbnails for the X3F files also.

Double click and sure enough it opened full screen. Right click and for testing purposes select Auto Level Adjust - yep that works. Export to jpg and bang, way less than a second later file saved as jpg.

OK Fasttone does not quite have the controls of SPP but if the base shot is close enough to what you want it is far far quicker (and free also). Pretty sure you could export to 16 bit TIFF too for messing around in LR with.
 
LR will import X3F files quite happily, either natively or converted to DNG (although I found when I did the latter the files did notprocess quite as nicely). I have a few thousand of them in my catalogues still from when I owned a DP2s.
 
Double click and sure enough it opened full screen. Right click and for testing purposes select Auto Level Adjust - yep that works.

Yes, I agree - Faststone is an excellent piece of software, and as you say, it works well with X3F files.

Just one thing of which to be aware: unless you have the setting for View Raw Files set at Actual Size, double-clicking on the thumbnail will open only the embedded Jpeg (i.e. it would not be working with the actual Raw file). This setting is located in the Settings dialogue box, on the Raw tab.

Obviously, if yours is already set to this, then you can ignore this.:)
 
LR will import X3F files quite happily, either natively or converted to DNG (although I found when I did the latter the files did notprocess quite as nicely). I have a few thousand of them in my catalogues still from when I owned a DP2s.
LR doesn't not support Merrill X3Fs, only the X3Fs of the older 4.9MP Sigma cameras.
 
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