Beta 2 of Iridient X-Transformer 1.0 came out a few days ago, but I have been slammed with GFX coverage. Keep the great dialog coming in our GFX owners group and follow our GFX owners page if you want to follow GFX specific news. It looks like the developer of Iridient responded to some of the issues users like me had with beta 1 quickly and I can’t wait to give beta 2 a try. I bolded the key points, but I have to say the swift turn around is very encouraging. Stay tuned for a second test of X-Transfomer, but it might have to wait till next month depending on the news cycle. I am curious to see how/if Iridient will handle GFX files in the future.
The Iridient X-Transformer 1.0 beta 2 update is now available for download:
http://www.iridientdigital.com/products/xtransformer_download.html
This release fixes several important issues including:
1) This release should resolve (hopefully) all issues with Windows or GPU display scaling. In the first beta if the display scaling was set to an intermediate value between 100% and 200% the title graphic could be drawn the wrong size causing the “Show Settings” button and other adjustment controls to be cropped out of the main window.
2) The orientation, landscape or portrait, information from the RAF is now correctly passed on to the DNG.
3) An issue has been fixed with uncompressed bit depths less than 16 bits/channel. This could result in false color tints or brightly colored blobs or outlines in regions with extreme, very bright highlights.
4) In some cases lens distortion correction could cause a slight cropping or zoomed in image. Only some lenses, mostly primes, were effected by this issue which only happened if the actual lens distortion correction was an identity correction (no correction at all).
5) The X-T2 and X-Pro2 models would have slightly different RAW crop origin depending on whether the RAF was compressed or uncompressed format. Both compressed and uncompressed formats should now match up with their RAW crop positioning at least when compared to Lightroom’s default crop for the same images.
6) The save to subfolders with original(s) option on the Save to Folder panel was not automatically creating the new subfolder if one did not exist already.
In addition this update also adds a few new features including the ability to disable any default Lightroom sharpening and/or noise reduction. Previously noise reduction was automatically turned off in most cases, as long as there was not an associated custom preset with noise reduction. Now both sharpening and noise reduction can be automatically disabled even if you are using a custom RAF preset that may have had noise reduction adjustments.
By default both sharpening and noise reduction is now disabled in Lightroom. If you were not already adjusting your Lightroom sharpening levels down previously this will lead to a notably different default rendering. The default rendering in Lightroom will have much less sharpening (or over sharpening) and apparent noise and artifacts should drop significantly.
If you preferred the previous rendering with Lightroom sharpening and/or noise reduction enabled these new options can all be turned off on the RAW Options panel.
Two new options have also been added to the Settings menu to allow for reduced processor utilization when running large batch jobs and wanting to continue work in other programs without the system becoming very unresponsive. One option allows you to reduce overall processor utilization by roughly half and the other forces large batch jobs to be processed one image after another rather than having multiple files simultaneously processed across available physical processor cores. Some Windows systems seem to become extremely unresponsive when using asychronous file loads and saves and if system responsiveness is a major issue when running large batch jobs this should help.
And finally I’ve made some adjustments to the sharpening and noise reduction levels. Sharpening now will automatically adjust certain aspects of its processing depending on the ISO of the image. This will lead to a slight weakening of sharpening at high ISO, but should also help reduce some noise and artifacts. This change should be fairly slight. Noise reduction levels, particularly luminance noise reduction, have also been strengthened especially at ISO 1600 and up.
Hopefully I haven’t now gone too far in the other direction with the noise reduction changes… anyway I’ll be listening to your feedback on what is a “good” range. Given the limited, coarse adjustments available in Iridient X-Transformer there is no way I can please everyone for every image, but the goal is to provide a reasonable default range with just a very few options that can suit a fairly wide range of personal styles and subjects. The goal of Iridient X-Transformer isn’t necessarily to produce a completely “finished” image like you would in full RAW processor with visual editing. The amount of sharpening and noise reduction is intended to be fairly mild, “capture” stage processing and in some cases additional adjustment in your RAW processor is going to be necessary for best final results. With beta 1 many seemed to feel the noise reduction levels were too weak at ISO 1600 and above even at the high level.
