Anyone Fuji shooters use Capture One? I use Lightroom but I’ve read it doesn’t handle Fuji raw very well. I’ve not noticed because it’s all I’ve ever used, but the internet suggests if you use Capture One you’ll get better sharpness and contrast.
You can also use DxO Pure Raw to preprocess the files before importing to Lightroom.
I might experiment with this but I thought I’d put it out there to see if anyone had direct experience.
From what I’ve heard recently a lot of that Fuji/Adobe crud online is dated from 5 years ago when they were in a bit of a feud. I did some samples between Lightroom/Capture One/ Fujifilm Raw Converter. I could see some minor processing differences especially in detail in highlights, but it wasn’t enough in the end for me.
I used Capture One for a few years, as I was frustrated with Adobe’s subscription model. It’s a great piece of software, but in the end I was just frustrated by how it worked as I was so used to Lightroom Classic’s operating structure (managing libraries). I even tweaked the UI so everything was in roughly the same place. In the end the processing improvements weren’t enough to beat my muscle memory and I wen’t back to Lightroom Classic.
Here’s a screen shot with Fuji’s Raw File Converter, it’s the most extreme difference I captured. Grass detail in the foreground, and the detail on the back of the girl to the left in the highlight is most noticeable. I wouldn’t say Lightroom is bad here, maybe even more “organic” looking, but the sharpening that the Fuji converter is doing is def different.
Thanks Mike!
I’ve been testing PureRAW vs the “Enhanced Noise Reduction” in Lightroom (cloud version – not sure if Classic has it). I can’t really tell the difference between them both are excellent and make the original look terrible by comparison. PureRAW interprets the colours and exposure slightly differently but that’s about it.
Here are some samples, but they’re JPEG exports so not the best comparison – but you can probably see the improvement.
Original ISO 3200 shot on X-T5. Basic edits in Lightroom
Same image but run through Lightroom’s Enhanced NR (set to 43)
Same image run through PureRAW 4
