Hey Chris,
Thanks for the quick response. As it happens, I reluctantly spent a bit more time playing around with these results earlier today. I say "reluctantly" as, being a bit lazy, what I'm really after is a solution to this issue that will work without having to spend forever tweaking images in front of a computer - I'd rather be taking images and get it almost right in camera, and just have minimal routines for processing (or at least ones to give me a reasonable starting point, that can be played with if necessary from there).
As it happens, I think I now need to retract pretty much most of what I said late last night! By then I had lost patience and felt defeated at having to accept an outcome that was not what I was hoping for. Now, on further analysis I think I HAVE successfully managed to get versions of all 6 test images that are every bit as detailed in LR (in each different scenario) as I previously got in ID. The thing that was bugging me (and lead to further experimentation) was that (a) I preferred the interpretations of the colours I was getting in LR to ID, and nothing whatsoever I tried before or since could get them to match adequately, and (b) I've recently invested in using the amazing VSCO Film simulation products for LR, which are designed to work with their unique and carefully mapped Camera Profiles (i.e. from RAW or DNG files) to give the best results (though they do have generic "Standard" profile presets for when you have to use other formats including TIFF, which is my only real output file option when using ID as it doesn't support DNG or other outputs with embedded camera profiles to the best of my knowledge). In fact, if you're impressed with the look of the Fuji in camera simulations (but Jpeg isn't sufficient for your needs), then I'd highly recommend a look at the VSCO Film packs, which bring back gorgeous film like looks to your images (with or without the optional film grain simulations too). These guys really know there stuff and have invested a lot of time doing amazing profiles of processed films.
Here's how I cracked the problem: First, I was using output settings for ID suggested by Olaf Stzaba, who's work I love (see -
http:////olafphotoblog.com/?s=iridient+developer). His simplified approach (after input from the author of ID) is "
R-L deconvolusion sharpening with the following inputs 0.5 & 30. Then we put saturation at 7 or 10 and adjust the exposure to our liking". To start with, with my DNG files in LR I used Pete Bridgwood's settings and ended up going with his sharpest "Tack " settings to give me anything like the detail I was getting in the ID files. However, the detail in the LR files was nowhere near as good, especially in the very high contrast landscape test shot I was using and, worse still, the example I used to test out the painterly effect in LR with repeated fine tree details showed up really strongly in one particular file (though we're talking pixel peeping at 200%). Here the comparison in detail of the ID files was huge.
Today however, whilst trying in vain to get the ID files to better match the colour rendition of the LR files, I started playing more with the Noise Reduction settings in the Detail panel in LR. I had noticed that, although the ID files had better detail, there were some observable artefacts being introduced (using ID's default noise reduction settings) though we're talking pretty subtle when scrutinised at 200%. In fact, if you look at the full sized files in Olaf's examples (link above), you can see them appearing there too (the best/worst example is the beach scene (bottom left corner), in the wet sand just before it meets the water to the right of the guy in the red t-shirt). They look like faint worm like patterns. So, in my LR files, I backed off the Noise Reduction settings to where you could see a tiny bit of noise zoomed at 200% (comparable to the ID files). First thing I noticed was that "voila" the painterly effect on my LR file with the tree detail was suddenly gone! So I pushed the Sharpening settings some more (leaving Detail set at 100, to still get RL Deconvolution), increasing the Amount slider (and in some cases pushing Radius a tad too) until comparable artefacts started appearing, and then backed them off a bit and/or played around with Masking.
In the end, I would say that some of the originally worst areas of the LR files (compared to ID) became at least as detailed, and here and there even MORE detailed than I had got with ID - unbelievable! For the life of me, I have no idea how or why I couldn't get this with my experimenting yesterday, but I guess learning the finer nuances of the LR settings takes time (and I'm not talking about "wanging" around the sliders as Guy Gowan likes to say, just tiny adjustments, a bit at a time). End result is that I'm finally every bit as happy with my LR files (and in some cases/respects more so) than those from ID. However, I confess I haven't experimented with the ID settings to see if I can improve output detail further still (and I don't think I can be bothered to). I did initially try some more subtle settings in ID for the portrait examples (as per
http://www.marksoon.com/blog/2014/fuji-x-trans-raw-processing - note the Iterations level is only 7, not 30 as used by Olaf Stzaba) but based on the preview in ID it looked ok when I pushed it higher - So I never checked actual output TIFF's at these lower settings.
The only down side (if you could call it that) was that EVERY image had to be tweaked differently in LR (just a bit) to get these results, whereas ID was originally giving me better results off the bat using the same settings. However, it has given me a better starting point to use for my own files from now on (and I have learnt a great deal), and in reality I will only be fine tuning my very best images, not every single one - so it's not a big issue.
Well, I think that's more than enough rambling from me - I apologise for going into such detail, but I thought this may help those of you pondering the same issues. Feel free to message me if you have any questions, or if you would like to see any of the files for side by side comparison.
Steve