Keith Alton Photography

Here is one form a recent shoot. Fuji XT-1 with the 35mm f/1.4

My experience with Lightroom is a love/hate one. In my experience Lightroom does in fact not handle the sharpening of my X-Trans files so well. I noticed it with my first RAW file from my old X Pro-1. So I use Photo Ninja for part of my workflow. I set it up as an external editor and send them to it when I am ready to sharpen and apply noise reduction. The other features of Lightroom I think work well. Also the film simulations are available in it, which I use a lot in my workflow. I used Iridient Developer for a while, but I think that Photo Ninja is better with noise reduction and I like the interface more. Lightroom excels in shadow and highlight recovery, in my opinion, and I use the local color adjustments a lot in my own editing, and I like how easy I can make those adjustments in Lightroom. So I think, until Adobe fixes this, using Lightroom is fine with X-Trans, it's just that you may have to add an external program to handle the sharpening etc. I did an experiment the other day. I shot a quick portrait of my daughter with an old Konica 57mm manual focus lens on my XT-1. The image was shot at 3200 ISO. At 100%, when comparing Lightroom to Photo Ninja after using noise reduction and sharpening on each, PN was significantly better in how it handled the noise and the sharpening. Lightroom gave the image that watercolor pattern I've read about. Inside the eyes I saw this the most. I've processed portraits in LR shot at 200 ISO and they were much better looking in this regard. It seems that when I sharpen in Lightroom at 100% detail, and try not to move the amount above 50%, with a small bit of masking, I get pretty good results. When I have to apply the noise reduction, LR starts to get worse. With landscapes I won't do the sharpening in LR. Even with the settings I mentioned LR still makes the foliage look bad.

I've owned mine since October, and change lenses a lot and never had an issue with sensor dust. I did have to wet clean my sensor because a water drop got on it though, :-/ My own stupidity caused that.