MB17
Regular
- Location
- Rio de Janeiro
- Name
- Marcos
Thanks Marcos. I loved the RX1 and would have kept it a good long time if not tempted by the Df. But that started a pretty thorough re-examination and thought process that led me back to Fuji. And, despite not being quite up to RX1 levels around the edges, it generally serves me well with a few different excellent primes instead of one utterly amazing prime.
All of my San Francisco shots were shot with raw + jpeg, with the jpegs set to the Velvia film emulation. For a lot of the daytime sunny weather shots outdoors, I generally used the jpegs because I love that Velvia look in certain circumstances. But I processed everything first in Lightroom and then in the Nik plug-ins of either Silver Efex Pro (B&W) or Color Efex Pro (color, sometimes touched up with Viveza also). In LR I just open it up and make any basic exposure changes that are needed (shadows, highlights, general exposure) and any NR that might be needed. In the Nik plug-in, beyond adding borders and a touch of vignetting, the processing is all over the place. Some I barely touched and others I touched quite a bit. A few to the point that I had to use the raw files because the jpegs couldn't handle my processing without breaking up and starting to show banding and other unpleasant stuff. I don't have any particular "recipes" for processing - I just open them in those programs, try a handful of presets I've saved, see which one seems to work best with the given image, and then start playing around with the particular settings in that combination of filters to get it where I like it.
Which probably doesn't help you other than to say that the Nik Plugins work well for me. The key is to find processing software you're comfortable with and just play with it until you know how to get a look or combination of looks you like out of it. I'm sure the same basic looks I get could be done a dozen other ways with other software - I'm just comfortable with these programs.
In terms of raw processing, it's true that Lightroom doesn't support XT1 files directly yet. But it's easy to get to them one of two ways. Either find the new version of the DNG converter online (I think its 8.4 and it's free) and convert all of your raw files to DNGs before opening them in Lightroom OR just use any EXIF editor to change the camera identifier in the EXIF from XT1 to XE2. The files are essentially identical and that's enough to fool Lightroom into opening the files. I find that doing a batch process of EXIF changes is a whole lot faster than converting a whole batch of files to DNG. And it might help preserve some future options for raw support when it's added.
I hope this helps,
-Ray
Ray,
Thank you so much for your explanation. You are very kind to be so detailed in your answers.
So it seems not much difference in PP from the RX1, right? Mostly when shooting, with the Velvia setup and the X-Trans by itself. Is that correct to assume? I ask this, because, I maybe wrong, of course, I liked your RX1 photos, but, if you let me say so, the Fuji seems to fit perfectly your style: framing, subject! They shine.
I'm very intrigued by the Fujis. I am about to buy a third camera to complement my system mostly on the wide end, and am closing on on the Sony NEX 5T. Although I would love to try a different maker than Sony (my other cameras are Sony's), I kind of fell in love with the idea of having again an articulated LCD, which I loved to use when I had a Pentax 750z. I work with many different artists and like to take self-portraits of me and them together taken by me and I also travel a lot by myself and have fun with some selfies... If Fuji had something almost as small as the NEX with an articulated LCD, I would try it... Pity. Bu who knows one day?
Thanks. Cheers!