HALOS on edges of high contrast content - X-T1

[brianrybolt]

Hello,

I am having some real problems with my Fuji X-T1.  I am getting very bad halos even at low ISO’s.  Shoot always in Raw and processing in Lightroom 5.  I have tried Iridient (bought it), and Capture 1 v.7 which happened to be the best in terms of colour rendition and lack of halos but I can not stand the interface and work flow of Capture 1 plus the fact there is not a decent asset management feature.  I have also tried different sharpening regimes but none do the trick.

Any help will be appreciated.  Thanks,
Brian

PS.  See attachment

[Ludwig Nobel]

Brian,

what you see is unfortunately Lightrooms way of rendering X-Trans files, and you will not be able to get rid of these artifacts without changing to another piece of software. I tried myself everything you can think of, LR is unusable for this kind of pictures for X-Trans files IMO.
C1 is it for me for my Fuji files, I found its rendering to be superior for my D810 also. Yes, the interface is different, but not worse. DAM features are of course not on par with LR.

Ludwig

[David Sutton]

I have had some success turning the sharpening module off in LR, exporting the tiff and then using something like Topaz Detail on it in Photoshop to do capture sharpening. Comparing the resulting file to the output from PhotoNinja I can see no difference in terms of artifacts or the quality of detail. However PhotoNinja does wipe the floor with LR when it comes to highlight recovery.
David

[Paul2660]

LR is very hard on transition areas like the ones shown in your image. I see similar issues with green leaves against a blue sky.

I also either cut LR sharpening way down or use C1. C1 is much more forgiving on this type of conversion.   Iridient seems to do the best but lacks the tool set of C1 or LR and is currenty Mac only.

Photo Ninja also works well but again toolset seems limited to me

Paul
 

[AFairley]

I have the same issue with LR5 and X-E2 files.  I get haloing on some edges even with LR sharpening turned off.  So I do initial demosaicing in Photo Ninja (basic exposure/tone adjustments to get in the ballpark, sharpening, perspective adjustments and cropping) and refine and print in LR.  PN integrates seamlessly with LR, you can use the "edit in" feature of LR and set up PN so it will open the original RAW file rather than the TIFF LR generates for editing. (Blogger Thomas Fitzgerald has posted a good tutorial.). I'd rather do everything in LR, but there it is....

[Paul2660]

Thanks for the tip, I agree totally that PN has such a much better raw conversion, but the tool set is so limited.  I did not realize this was possible, and it's much more effective.

Paul

[Chris Kern]

I am having some real problems with my Fuji X-T1.  I am getting very bad halos even at low ISO’s.  Shoot always in Raw and processing in Lightroom 5.  I have tried Iridient (bought it), and Capture 1 v.7 which happened to be the best in terms of colour rendition and lack of halos but I can not stand the interface and work flow of Capture 1 plus the fact there is not a decent asset management feature.  I have also tried different sharpening regimes but none do the trick.

My experience is that the raw files from the Fujifilm cameras can't accept aggressive sharpening in Lightroom as well as those from cameras with Bayer sensors.  I haven't been able to find any better alternative than using a lighter touch on the sharpening-amount slider than I would with a Bayer-pattern file.  With narrow, high-contrast transitions, such as the ones in the image you posted, it seems you often have to put up with slightly soft edges or with halos.  And if you can reach a point where the edges are acceptably sharp and the halos are tolerable, you risk introducing artifacts in smooth surfaces elsewhere in the image—setting off a tug-of-war between the smooth areas and the quality of the fine details.  Of course, these issues can occur with files from any camera, but the X-Trans sensor seems especially prone to them.  I don't know whether that's because the algorithm used by Lightroom for demosiacing the Fuji files is suboptimal or whether it's the result of some innate characteristic of the 6x6 pixel set of the sensor.  I suspect it may be the latter because I've read that Fujifilm reps have been advising Adobe, and presumably other manufacturers of raw conversion software, on how to interpret the X-Trans files.

I've attached two views of one of my own pictures from an X-E2 (same sensor and processor as the X-T1) with the kind of high-contrast edges in your example.  The first attachment is the entire frame.  The second is a full-resolution crop from a portion of the image with the high-contrast edges; I turned off output sharpening on the crop in order to display the actual pixels I was working with in Lightroom.  Viewed at 1:1, the halos, though visible, are what I consider to be acceptable.  (That's debatable, of course.)  I would have liked to make the edges slightly crisper, but when I tried I immediately began to see very objectionable artifacts in the man's face.  The only way I could find to eliminate those artifacts without reducing the sharpening amount was to increase the masking amount, and that adversely affected the fine detail in the stonework.  It's a tricky process trying to find the optimum balance among the various Lightroom sharpening controls.  I haven't found any single formula that works well most of the time, or perfectly in any case.

[AFairley]

Chris, I'm sure the Fuji pattern has something to do with it, but the fact remains that if you demosaiced your problem images in Photo Ninja, and I am told, Capture One or Iridient, the haloing problem would not be there, or at least greatly diminished compared to Lightroom.

[Paul2660]

Chris, I'm sure the Fuji pattern has something to do with it, but the fact remains that if you demosaiced your problem images in Photo Ninja, and I am told, Capture One or Iridient, the haloing problem would not be there, or at least greatly diminished compared to Lightroom.

It makes a huge difference and the amount of detail recovered is impressive.  I am only using Photo Ninja as I don't have a mac, which Iridient needs.  But I have used Iridient and it does a great job on details, just has no really tool kit for working the files.

Photo Ninja has a neat feature where you can export through LR, work up the file with just the raw conversion and a bit of sharpening, then quick render it back to LR.  Photo Ninja works the file as if it's a raw file.  Then you quick render back to LR.  Now you can work the rest of the image in LR using the better tools.  It's rendered back as a tiff but I can't see any issues.  And the amount of detail is very impressive. 

LR just does strange things to the x-trans raws, I see this with the haloing reported by the OP (green leaves against blue skies) or patterns on rocks where the patterns take on a more plastic look to me. 

This is not perfect but still gets a lot more from the file. 

I would rather Photo Ninja allow a render to a DNG so you could open the file that way into LR. 

Maybe LR 6 will show some improvements.  It surprises me that LR's conversion is so poor on the x-trans as they do a very good job on so many other cameras.  I had hoped that LR would buy the rights to Iridient or Photo Ninja and incorporate their conversion, but hasn't happened yet.

Paul

[Chris Kern]

Chris, I'm sure the Fuji pattern has something to do with it, but the fact remains that if you demosaiced your problem images in Photo Ninja, and I am told, Capture One or Iridient, the haloing problem would not be there, or at least greatly diminished compared to Lightroom.

I had routinely been using Iridient to render X-Trans files until I discovered the sharpening-detail trick described in this thread because I felt it typically was better than Lightroom at extracting detail from the Fujifilm captures.  In general, however, with equivalent sharpening I'm hard put to see any difference in the halos produced respectively by Iridient and Lightroom.  If Iridient does have a slight edge, for my purposes it's not significant enough to justify the extra complexity of adding another application to my workflow.

Photo Ninja is another matter.  I downloaded a trial copy and ran it against the photo that I uploaded earlier in this thread.  Again with equivalent sharpening, it was clearly superior to Lightroom in suppressing halos—and it did at least as well with the fine details.  Unfortunately, the current release of Photo Ninja does not apply the lens corrections embedded in the Fuji raw file's metadata, which is a serious omission from my perspective (pun intended).  If I could figure out a workaround for this, I'd be tempted to purchase a license for the product.

[armand]

I installed a trial of Capture One 8, will see how it goes although I suspect color will still be a problem. In the past a quick trial of Photo Ninja was promising detail wise but color was still an issue, I'll try again a newer version.

I know color is relative but LR profile for Provia is quite close to ideal without much work. I could sometimes get similar color with the others but needs more post processing time and that's not the joy of my life.

The reason to keep trying the others is that in LR with the "new" sharpening technique I still get some plasticky look sometimes and detail could be better; it is better that before but still not good enough. Without bigger prints it's not that obvious though so I choose color.

[AFairley]

Chris, Photo Ninja does allow you to create lens profiles, it's pretty easy.  You take a pic of something with a rectilinear grid pattern and place alignment dots along the grid in PN, which generates a PN lens profile.  However, it does not provide the vignetting and CA corrections that Adobe's lens profiles do.  PN has just released an update, it's not clear to me whether it provides out of the box corrections for Fuji lenses, I have not looked into it yet.

[Chris Kern]

PN has just released an update, it's not clear to me whether it provides out of the box corrections for Fuji lenses, I have not looked into it yet.

It doesn't.  I've been in contact today with a manufacturer's rep, who told me the company (PictureCode) has asked Fuji for information about the encoding of the lens-correction values in the metadata makersnotes, but has not received it yet.  It's pretty clear a new rev of the product that would provide automatic lens corrections for the X-Trans cameras is not in the current development pipeline.

[armand]

Just tried Capture One 8 on some recent pictures, still to try it on my "problem" shots.

Few points I can already make:

Details
- more detailed than LR with caveats;
- it slightly looks oversharpened/ higher contrast sometimes but it does it without increasing the noise as LR
- definitely better noise control with lifting the shadows or with sharpening
- it doesn't have the halos mentioned in this post and which were present in my LR test shot, so if that's the problem you can definitely use it
- in areas that don't have much green the detail is similar, but I didn't get to some shots where the "classic" plastic look was present
- in many areas while details seemed better I'm not convinced it will make a difference in print

Color
- didn't get yet to the more difficult shots but from what I saw the X-T1 generic is still off, as is X-E2 generic v1
- if I use X-E2 generic v2 it's much closer but slightly warmer; in terms of accuracy it might be as close to the original colors as Provia profile from LR
- in general the WB is warmer by default


So some prelim conclusions are very similar to what I got more than 6 months ago when I tried it against LR:
- better detail and with no halos but with unclear advantage in print for most situations
- better noise handling
- LR with the "detail" sharpening narrowed the difference a lot
- colors are still not as good as LR but getting much closer

[AFairley]

It doesn't.  I've been in contact today with a manufacturer's rep, who told me the company (PictureCode) has asked Fuji for information about the encoding of the lens-correction values in the metadata makersnotes, but has not received it yet.  It's pretty clear a new rev of the product that would provide automatic lens corrections for the X-Trans cameras is not in the current development pipeline.

Thanks for the info, Chris.  I have a PN profile for the 18-55mm f2.8-4 a Fuji/PN user on DPReview made which seems to work well, message me if you'd like me to send it to you.

[armand]

Continued

I tried also the last version of Photo Ninja.

What I said in the last post remains mostly valid.

1. for "normal" detailed photos Capture One is the best, clearly, at least at the pixel level
- to achieve better sharpness with increasing the detail slider to 100% in the LR there is noise introduced while CO controls it really well with better sharpness
- PN gives maybe a little more contrast but with much increase in noise also;
- PN introduces a lot of small false detail which feels out of place in most shots, particularly as it does so also in areas without much details as the sky; the only times it makes a positive difference is in well lit low iso shots with very fine details, as a lot of grass in the distance
- decent amount of artifacts with LR, mostly in the areas of high contrast, some artifacts with PN, minimal artifacts with CO
- highlight recovery in PN remains quite cool, as it fills the blown areas with color from the surrounding colors, a feature like this with an on/off would be very nice

2. for overall "fit to screen" appearance PN makes it easiest to have more contrast without going over board with saturation and color shifts, LR is slightly better than CO

3. color wise LR remains the one to beat
- CO gets quite close though using the X-E2 profile v2 for X-T1 shots, and X-E1 generic v1 for X-E1 shots;
- for trickier colors PN is bad

4. performance
- LR is best
- CO had some very slow moments, despite it looked like it finished building its catalog; could process a photo several times, almost gave up on it
- PN crashed once

5. ease of use
- I'm used to LR so it was significantly faster to get any adjustments done in LR

Will I use more CO? Maybe, still on the fence as for most shots LR is ok especially if I don't print big or pixel-peep excessively.

[Chris Kern]

Continued

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[contents elided]
. . .

Interesting summary.

Unfortunately, there are too many moving parts at the moment.  Let's hope version 6 of Lightroom provides improved support for X-Trans files.  That would seem to be the cleanest solution—at least for those of us who are committed to LR for asset management.

[armand]

Interesting summary.

Unfortunately, there are too many moving parts at the moment.  Let's hope version 6 of Lightroom provides improved support for X-Trans files.  That would seem to be the cleanest solution—at least for those of us who are committed to LR for asset management.

That would be my hope although I will admit CO was quite good, better than I expected.

[mbaginy]

This is an interesting discussion.

I've noticed similar haloing with the raw files from my X-Pro1 and recently purchased (graphite silver) X-T1.  I use LR5 to convert to b&w and like to darken the blue sky.  That causes severe haloing around greenish, yellowish foliage.  I've had to reduce the darkening of the blue and aqua.  And I've had to reduce the radius of sharpening below the default of input sharpening.

Still not completely satisfied with the (LR5) results and I guess I'll have to experiment with another raw converter.  Canon 5D and 5D Mk III files seem somewhat less difficult to adjust.

[armand]

As I need some brainwashing after a day of work I'm posting a first photo on which I compared the x-trans converters.
The differences are slightly larger as these are screenshots (didn't get a code for PN to be able to export) which are compressed to jpeg at 80% (in IrfanView).
These being said they don't look that far from what I see on the monitor so they are good enough.

First the entire shot as rendered by each program

PS. ISO 1000, F9, 55-200 @ 55, 1/80 (handheld)