As I mentioned in my previous post, I agree that Iridient Developer is still better able than Lightroom to handle fine detail in Fuji X-Trans files as long as you use Iridient’s sharpening tools.
What I’ve been testing (albeit informally) is whether Iridient X-Transformer’s ability to demosaic Fuji X-Trans files is substantially superior to Lightroom’s. In other words, I’m trying to determine whether it is worth the hassle to invoke a different raw pre-processor to render the file, and then edit the actual pixels with Lightroom.
I really would prefer not to do this because it vitiates what for me is Lightroom’s greatest single strength: the ability to make and preview a series of edits that won’t be applied until I export the image—the method often described as “parametric editing.”
For a while, however, I was routinely using Iridient Developer to demosaic X-Trans files because I was under the impression that LR couldn’t handle the Fuji sensor pattern as well as Iridient.
But now, I think Lightroom has caught up. Or maybe my technique has improved. Since Adobe hasn’t been very transparent about what it has been doing with respect to X-Trans processing, I can only guess and test.
I’ve attached a full frame of an original Fuji X-T2 image with a lot of fine detail. The next three attachments show comparisons of a crop made from the raw file (Lightroom) and the demosaiced linear DNG (emitted by Iridient X-Transformer) as sharpened by Lightroom with the Radius slider at 0.8 and the sharpening Amount slider at 25 percent, 50 percent and 100 percent, respectively. Note that all the sharpening has been performed in Lightroom; I only used the Iridient product to render the raw file.
At each level of sharpening, both versions look essentially equally good—or bad—to me. Whether rendered on-the-fly by Lightroom or prior to sharpening by X-Transformer, it seems to me that Lightroom's sharpening tools need to be used fairly sparingly with 24 Mpx X-Trans files. I rarely push the Amount slider above 50 percent.
Needless to say, my desire to perform essentially all editing in Lightroom reflects a personal preference. I occasionally make a round-trip to Photoshop—usually because I need its content-aware fill capability—but that’s a last resort because, whenever possible, I want to make it easy to try alternative editing approaches without discarding anything I have done before.
That to me is Lightroom’s greatest strength and it’s the reason that I’m willing to accept a small and usually barely-detectable loss of fine detail in order to keep my workflow as straightforward as possible.
