X Trans ( FUJI ) Jpegs - Lightroom C/C - Enhance Details

[AdamL]

Hello,

I’m about to purchase a Fuji X100V and know that some photographers have complained in the past about Lightrooms ability to render crisp fine details eg foliage.

I plan to edit “on the move” and wish to use L/R C/C on my Ipad Pro to fine tune my Fuji Jpegs.

I like L/R as the process from start to finish seems seamless - Great.

The point is this. Will the relatively new “enhance details” feature on lightroom work for Jpegs or is it purely for Raw ?

I like the idea of Jpegs, as Fuji’s are very good however sometimes a tweak is necessary.

Thank you much for reading this.

Adam

[lamacchiacosta]

I would shoot RAW+Jpeg if I was you and tweak the RAW file.

[Herco]

When you shoot RAW+JPEG it doesn't make sense to edit the JPEG with tools like sharpening, noise reduction and enhance details in LR or C1 or any of those tools. In almost all cases it makes the JPEG quality worse. All these 'raw-processing actions' are done by the camera when processing the RAW file to a JPEG. You can control that process by the camera settings: http://fujifilm-dsc.com/en-int/manual/x100v/menu_shooting/image_quality_setting/index.html or create a custom setting in your camera to handle that.

What you can do with the JPEG in LR or C1 are actions like cropping, culling and tagging. You can also make limited changes to white balance and overall exposure but even these I would preferably do on the RAW file rather than the JPEG. The issue is that the JPEG is a compressed file with severely reduced dynamic range and colors. Changes to these files generally have a much broader impact, than the pinpoint precision that you can apply to a RAW-file.

Consider the RAW file to be the original Word document and the JPEG the PDF-file. It's much easier to invisibly change the text of a document in Word before making a PDF of it, than to try and change the text in the PDF viewer. It's like putting raisins into an already baked cake... 🙂

What you can do is use the Fuji film profiles/simulations that are available in LR or C1 and apply these on the RAW-files. Note that the profiles in C1 are much better and closer to the original Fuji film simulations than those of LR. An alternative is using Fuji X Raw Studio software. It uses the JPEG-engine in your camera to rerun the RAW to JPEG conversion, based on the settings that you apply in the software. So if you have a JPEG but you need slightly more sharpening, connect your camera to the software, find the original RAW-file, change the IQ settings and rerun the JPEG conversion. 

Edited January 8, 2021 by Herco