Shooting in RAW with the Fuji X10 Part2

I had a chance over the weekend to download the trial version of Lightroom 4.3 from Adobe's website. I'm looking at RAW Conversion software for the tricky X10 RAW files (Fuji call them RAF files), and had hit a brick wall with all of the options I personally owned (see last post).

Except for a very brief stint several years ago, I've never been a Lightroom user - choosing Aperture instead. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and maybe Apple wasn't the way to go, but they were the first to come out with a 'Pro' RAW conversion application, and I was an early adopter. So I've stayed with them all the way through.

But now it seems that they have lagged too far behind, offering no RAW support for the X10 (and an apparently inferior RAW processing engine, depending on who you listen to)? So I downloaded Lightoom, to see if it offers better support for the X10.

Lightroom and Fuji RAF files - a beautiful thing.

The above image speaks volumes! Finally, RAW success. Good on you Adobe (sigh). If I want to shoot RAW with the Fuji X10, it looks like I will have to also invest in Adobe Lightroom as well. Probably money well spent, but I was hoping to avoid the extra expense if possible?

And then I had another thought. What if I converted the RAF files to the universal Adobe DNG RAW format and then imported the resulting DNG's into Aperture. Would that work?

Aperture lives to fight again - or does it?

Haha! Success again! Aperture will read the converted DNG files from the X10's RAW (RAF) ones, and then you have all the controls and adjustments available to you as if you were directly reading the out-of-camera RAW file.

The images looked good - but not great I have to say - so that also got me thinking... what kind of damage has been done to the file in the process? To find out, I processed the same RAW image in Aperture and Lightroom, and compared the resulting exported tiff.

Zooming in on a section from the Aperture file.

The first image is from Aperture. It has good colour, but the noise is fairly high (for an ISO 100 image), and the sharpness is also lacking. Overall ok, but it's not brilliant.

And the Lightroom version.

It may be difficult to tell on the internet (click on both to enlarge them for a more telling comparison), but I can assure you the Lightroom version taken directly from the Fuji RAF file is 'miles' better. Clearer, sharper, much less noise - the kind of image I would expect from the Fuji X10 (thankfully).

So final conclusion, as much as I don't want to admit it... - buy Lightroom :-) Darn it.

I have the trial version for another 28 days. In that time I will shoot some more RAW + Jpeg on the X10, to see if the Jpeg rendering makes shooting in RAW obsolete - and to look at the Jpeg comparison of Aperture and Lightroom straight out of the camera - to see if Aperture is worth persevering with, or whether I do, indeed, need to be switching camps. I have a sneaking suspicion I may know the answer to that already?  :-(