A quick post this morning to round up the week:
- I have a new essay on the Kage Collective site entitled Gods & Machinery. Entirely shot with the X-Pro1 and XF 35mm f/1.4 lens. Used a personal offshoot of the new VSCO Film 03 as part of the editing process.
- In other Kage news: Derek Clark is one of 10 finalists in the News category for Professional Photographer of the Year UK. Amazing achievement. Huge congratulations on that one.
- Flemming Bo Jensen is doing his nomad thing and shares his beat poet thoughts in a wonderful post entitled To be a kid again.
- Robert Boyer is still at it and has promised retaliation in our ongoing challenge. Can't wait to see how that turns out. In the meantime check out the first eBook of his new Lighting Field Guides series. It focuses solely on window light but I guarantee you'll never look at patio doors the same way again. I'll have a full review eventually but believe me: well worth the $4.99.
Last but not least: proper X Trans raw demosaicing finally comes to Adobe Lightroom. It's not in the official version just yet but Release Candidate 4.4 is available for download and appears to be stable enough to use. I've been testing this and I have to say it's a huge improvement over the previous version. The files out of the box are slightly softer than before but you can now push all the sharpening parameters as you would on any other file without introducing the dreaded watercolour syndrome. I'm still seeing some issues with things like grass but to a much lesser extent; overall I'd say we're finally seeing proper rendering of these raf files.
I did however need to use the Moiré brush on some product shots that didn't need it before. It's always about tradeoffs. But with this update I'm now going to consider raw files much more seriously when shooting the X-Pro1.
A few test shots below. Not necessarily an example of the most problematic type of image but it's what I was shooting. All processed from raw and shot with the X-Pro1 and XF 35mm f/1.4. The last image is a crop of #2 — That's pretty darn sharp methinks.
Later.
