I’m still in the process of deciding, which RAW editor is the best way forward and out of the world of Adobe, but Lightroom CC really surprised me in the above comparison. The above 100% crops were all taken from a Fujifilm X-T1 image I captured a while ago for my Fujinon XF100-400 Review and I always loved the detail in the feathers, which are very delicate and a great way to judge a RAW processor. Personally, I am heavily leaning towards Luminar 2018 for detail, but overall image quality is hard to decide.
I very lightly edited each of these images to taste for this post, but each gave very different colors without me adjusting color, which is interesting. I created the above image at maximum quality so you can pixel peep it, but to see the full images you have to check out my 500px account. I was going to provide multiple crops from these images to show how noise presents itself in shadows and more, but these files are big and Darktable in particular creates JPG files similar in size to RAW files so, for now, you will have to pixel peep around the 500px images below.
Lightroom CC Iridient X-Transformer
In a future post, ill try to grab some photos for this kind of comparison with my Fujifilm X-T2 and Fujifilm GFX. Maybe I’ll use a portrait or something that can be cross-compared. All of these RAW editors are very different and some can be a lot more frustrating than others to work with, which is another factor to take into consideration. Once you step outside the Lightroom bubble it can be hard to establish a rhythm, but many of these programs are getting better every day. Some took me seconds to edit, while others made me very frustrated.
If anyone wants to set me up with some additional RAW editors to include in the future I am more than happy to include them. I can only purchase so much and Capture One 11 has been a rather large and disappointing purchase so far. Maybe I will enjoy it with other cameras or maybe it will work better with 24MP X-Trans files. Future tests will tell. Below you can find links to all the tested software and many have very functional trials that you can try yourself.
Luminar 2018 (Discount Code FUJIADDICT)
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