Fuji WCL-X100 and distortion when shooting raw?

Mytola

Regular
I'm a bit on the fence at the moment, wondering if I should get the WCL or not... The thing that seems to come up after a lot of googling for reviews is that the raw-files are not corrected for distortion, and that ACR hasn't got a profile for the X100 with WCL. Most of the sources are a bit old, so I was wondering if anyone has got any experience with this. Shooting jpeg is not an option for me, and I don't really like distortion.
 
I don't have an answer, but it's rather straight-forward barrel distortion, wouldn't it be easy to correct manually?

I don't use ACR, so I don't know.
 
Have you told the camera you have th wide angle adapter on? I know it's in the menu somewhere, and the camera doesn't know what sort of optics to correct for without that information.

Oops, sorry. I don't image the camera would correct for raw, but you probably need the menu item checked anyway, so the the appropriate information can get to the raw converter. All of this is an educated guess, but it seems reasonable to me.
 
I was wondering the same thing. I have an X100S on order and would really like a 28mm equivalent option, but I read the same things and was curious if this was easily correctable in LightRoom or not.
 
The camera writes metadata for the WCL into the RAW. The internal and external converters can use this data if they are capable of lens corrections. Lightroom/ACR and Silkypix both use embedded lens correction metadata, so does Capture One.
 
The camera writes metadata for the WCL into the RAW. The internal and external converters can use this data if they are capable of lens corrections. Lightroom/ACR and Silkypix both use embedded lens correction metadata, so does Capture One.

That's what I read elsewhere but I wasn't sure if LR can read that info and has a suitable profile to correct the distortion or not. At least a few people were reporting that with correction distortion was still present. But, it could be operator error, or older profile versions (so I'm hoping anyway).
 
Lightroom etc. don't use any dedicated lens profiles for the WCL, they simply use the metadata, as mentioned before. The metadata is the lens profile!
 
It does correct for distortion when I open RAW files in LR4. Here are two examples, one with the Wide Converter menu setting enabled and one without.

View attachment 786View attachment 787

Once you enable the Wide Conversion lens the optical viewfinder frame lines gets extended, but I find that they are still not wide enough and the camera captures much more than the finder shows. Plus there is no parallax correction for the framelines in this mode.

It's a fun option to have though.

-Thomas
 

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It does correct for distortion when I open RAW files in LR4. Here are two examples, one with the Wide Converter menu setting enabled and one without.

[...]

Once you enable the Wide Conversion lens the optical viewfinder frame lines gets extended, but I find that they are still not wide enough and the camera captures much more than the finder shows. Plus there is no parallax correction for the framelines in this mode.

It's a fun option to have though.

Thanks for the confirmation Thomas. Looks good to me based on your example shot, :)

That's good to know about the parallax correction and framelines also. Appreciate the info!
 
Aha! I thought it might have been updated in later versions of LR/ACR, as the complaints I read about it was for LR 3x... Very nice to know that the current version of LR/ACR reads the correction info from the raw-files. This info means that I can go ahead and get the WCL then. Great! :)
 
Using lens correcion data in the RAW file is the current trend, as all converters can use the same correction data that is coming directly from the lens manufacturer. It is also the same data that the camera's internal engine is using for JPEGs, so results from different converters should look quie similar when overlayed, as they all use the same parameters. Of course, Adobe and others can still offer custom lens correction modules that are different or better.
 
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