Following on from my last post about H2 Raw files and the 2 day conference event I mentioned in that post…
When working with a client, no matter the final use of the images (unless for speed is of the essence / press use only), I prefer to work with Raw images to ensure the best possible quality. So when it came to the two day conference event, I was editing the next day, at home on the studio, so the speed of the Raw files was not an issue.
As photographers I guess we really earn our money at events like these when the lighting is difficult (In addition to our creativity and vision obviously ).
As I was editing, I was not really happy with the darkness of the shadows in the long exposure images below – the lighting in the venue along with the light boards making it really difficult to master contrasts. In lightroom I really lifted the shadows and exposure, pulling back the hi-lights. As expected that brings out all sort of noise artefacts in the darks. I then added the image to the lightroom quick collection and moved on to the next.
When I got to the late night party images, where the venue was dark with pockets of light, I was shooting at 2500 and above on the H2 & H2s.
The images were usable as-was on both cameras but I thought they could be improved and I found myself adding more H2 images to the quick collection for a further look.
Once I had edited all the images, I returned to those in the quick collection, sending them to DxO Pure Raw for tidying.
The image block above shows a number of before and after.. (although to be honest, the size of the images I post here does mean the noise on the un-cleaned up images is not as visible as it is in the full-sized versions).
Here is a 1:1 from one of the above images to hi light
Pure Raw uses profiles that are calibrated to the camera and lenses (downloading any if needed) to demosaic, remove any distortions before de-noising and sharpening the images and adding the resultant DNG files back into Lightroom. As a batch process, I could go and make a nice cup of coffee as it worked away.
The result of the DxO process is a clean DNG file that Lightroom can deal with really easily (maybe this is what I should have tried at the Girls on Film event mentioned in the last post) stacked alongside the original Raws.
The combination of the H2 & DxO creates sharp, clean files that are way better than I have experienced with previous Fuji X-Tans cameras. In fact, so much so that I have decided to trade in my GFX50R. That however is a story for another time.
Let me know your thoughts.
Jx
Julie Edwards-X 