About Thomas Fitzgerald

Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography. 

X-Pro 2 Diary: Part 3 - The Current State of Raw Converters

X-Pro 2 Diary: Part 3 - The Current State of Raw Converters

One of my main reasons for getting an X-Pro 2, apart for the obvious one of having the camera to use, was so that I could keep my e-book guides up to date. To that end I've been doings some testing with the various different raw converters out there, and here are my preliminary findings so far.

Lightroom

Lightroom still suffers from the same issue it always has when it comes to X-Trans files. Find detail is smeared and when you have a lot of repetitive fine detail there is false edges and false detail. Anyway, as this has been discussed to death at this point, I'm not going to go into it in much detail. The extra resolution helps, and it's only something you will see on certain types of images, and yes, it is probably good enough for most people, but it's a real shame Adobe hasn't figured this out yet.

There does appear to be one new issue wth Lightroom though. As with the original X100, if you use the DR modes in camera (DR200, DR400) then the raw appears to come in underexposed in Lightroom. On other X-Series cameras, this is compensated for automatically, but it doesn't appear to be the case on the X-Pro 2, at least based on my testing so far. I need to do some more tests to completely confirm this. I may have done something else that's causing this to happen, but I don't think so. If there are any other X-Pro 2 users out there, perhaps you can confirm or refute this?

Capture One

Capture One's X-Pro 2 support is still listed as preliminary. They seem to be a bit slow in adding full support too, as there has been some updates since, and it still hasn't improved the handling of X-Pro 2 files. It still only supports uncompressed Raw. Even with that in mind, for files it does support, it's currently not great. The colour calibration seems to be off, and the black leves are a little too high, in my opinion. More importantly though, lens correction is not supported. Not only does it not let you use automatic correction based on the lens metadata, but it won't even let you manually correct the lens. This includes chromatic aberration and purple fringing, at least I can't figure out how to do it. It's not too bad if you're using some of Fuji's better prime lenses, but on the 18-55 zoom, it's designed to be corrected in software, and without it it's pretty bad.

At the moment, I would hesitate to use Capture One with the X-Pro 2 if you're using any of the zoom lenses, but depending on your lenses, and the type of photography that you're doing, the lack of lens correction and the poor calibration may be an issue for you. Apparently they are aware of the issue and support is "coming soon".

Iridient Developer

Iridient Developer has full support for the X-Pro 2 and it's one of the best so far in my opinion. There are some caveats, but so far it seems to work well. You may need to use different settings that you're used to for current X-series cameras, and I'll be posting my preliminary settings in a few days, once I've done some more testing. (I'll upgrade my guide with settings for the X-Pro 2 once I've finished testing too)

The one thing that I have noticed is that chromatic aberration isn't completely corrected by the software. You could occasionally get this with other X-series cameras too, so I don't think it's anything new, but I've noticed it a bit more with X-Pro 2 images.

Processed with Iridient Developer

Photo Ninja

The latest version of Photo Ninja brings full support for the X-Pro 2. It had previously only supported uncompressed files. Based on some quick testing, the quality seems to be pretty good. It looks and behaves the same ways as it did with raw files from previous X-Trans cameras

Apple Photos / Aperture / OS X

Apple still hasn't added support for the X-Pro 2 yet. Considering that the camera has been out for a while now, I'm a little surprised that Apple has been slow in supporting it. Even if you don't use Photos or Aperture, but are working on a mac, this does still affect you, as it means you can't use the Quick Look feature on X-Pro 2 raw files, and the icons just show up as generic icons in the finder.

Affinity Photo & Polarr Photo Editor

I've covered both of these applications on the blog before, and both of these currently lack support for X-Pro 2 Raw files. What's more, attempting to open X-PRo 2 Raw files with either of these applications will crash the respective software.

Mylio

Mylio has support for X-Pro 2 raw files, and the quality isn't bad, but it's not great either. What's more, it lacks some key controls, so it's not something I would recommend as your primary raw converter. Having said that, because they are supported you can use it as an asset manager of sorts.

Other Apps

I know that there are other applications out there that some people use, but these are all I have in my testing suite. I also don't have access to Windows for testing on, so If there are any windows specific applications out there, I'm sorry that I can't test them. Perhaps if there are any users who have used any other applications with the X-Pro 2 you can update us in the comments below.

VSCO support

One other thing of note. I know it's not technically a RAW converter, but a lot of people still use them, so I thought that I would mention it anyway. VSCO have not updated their Lightroom presets to support the X-Pro 2 yet either. You can still use it in "generic" mode, but the custom colour profiles haven't been updated. I'm hoping that they will add support, and I've reached out to them to see if I can get any kind of answer, but for now, you need to use the generic versions, rather than the fuji specific ones.



If you like what I'm doing here and want to show support, then you can do so by buying something from my Digital Download Store

I have Lightroom PresetsPhotoshop ACR PresetsTextures and e-books all available for download. 

If you're a Fuji X-Trans shooter and Lightroom user, check out my guide to post processing X-Trans files in Lightroom. I also have a guide for processing X-Trans files in Capture One



Street Photography Diary: Issue 16

Street Photography Diary: Issue 16

Fuji X-Pro 2 diary: Part 2 - Acros

Fuji X-Pro 2 diary: Part 2 - Acros