Fujifilm X100s Post-Processing Frustration

[rexbobcat]

I bought a Fujifilm X100s at the beginning of February because I heard good things, and I wanted a casual camera that produced good quality photos. It's a fantastic camera, and I think the files rival those of my 6D, HOWEVER....It produces the most aggravatingly difficult files to post-process.

Some of that comes from how good the in-camera JPEG engine is. I don't know who Fuji's firmware developer is, but bravo. Unfortunately, the way that the camera interprets files is very good, but it's ridiculously difficult to replicate in Lightroom or Photoshop. I just...don't know how Fuji treats the tone curve in its JPEGs but it seems to be completely proprietary and near impossible to replicate.

Another issue is that some raws are DRASTICALLY different from its OOC JPEG counterpart, but then others are interpreted almost identically by Adobe.

Examples:

This is the JPEG edited with in-camera



And this is the .RAF raw file freshly uploaded into Lightroom 5




Now, my 6D .CR2 files aren't the prettiest right out of the camera, but I've never, ever seen a raw as ugly as that right off the bat.


But then there are shots like these:

Edited in-camera



Default Lightroom raw





How can there be such a discrepancy between the files in some cases, but not others? Is there a raw processor that doesn't butcher 60% of Fuji's otherwise beautiful files?

 

[rexbobcat]

Maybe it's just me. I don't know. I'm just constantly disappointed by Lightroom's interpretation. And yeah, yeah, it's a raw file. It's supposed to require editing.

But, it took me 15 minutes just to figure out how to approximate Fuji's JPEG processing. It's not just a simple "add contrast" solution.

Here's the closest I can get:


In-camera:

View attachment 67833

Lightroom:




The raws just seem so...muddy regardless of what I do in Lightroom. I just feel like it shouldn't be this difficult to process photos to make them look presentable. Maybe I'm expecting too much?

 

[Ysarex]

PhotoNinja.

 

[bribrius]

i heard this once before from someone about Nikon. seems they stayed with the Nikon program for their Nikon for similar issues (even though they weren't a fan of it).

 

[rexbobcat]

PhotoNinja.

I recently installed the trial of that one. It's exposure and toning is pretty nice, but do you find that it has a tendency to oversaturate files at default? They seem very vibrant when I open them.

 

[bigal1000]

Why not use the software that came with the camera,I assume it did have some editing software included. I have read a lot about problems with Fuji's x-trans sensor and raw files. The jpeg files are supposed to excellent though.