If that’s the case then NEWS FLASH – RAW files should look as flat as dish-water pre-process, and you have do some work to make them look good. The Case To Answerįirstly, a lot of you might be wondering WTF I’m ranting on about – your RAW image previews look great before you start doing anything to them – mmmmm…. Only by learning how to Neutralise Hidden Exposure Compensation can we actually arrive at a suitable starting point for the development process. In other words Lightroom adds hidden adjustments which we cannot see because they are not registered on the adjustment sliders under process version 2012.īut when I take into account the support Lightroom currently offers for mobile phone cameras, cloud synch etc, I can’t help thinking that Adobe are trying to give Lightroom some sort of mass-market appeal by adding what the designers and coders think is some sort of WOW-factor to image previews – though I might be wrong!īut whatever Adobes reasoning, the fact remains that SOME OF US want to see our raw files for what they are – straight gamma 2.2 encoded versions of what the sensor recorded. It uses a variety of ‘behind the scenes’ algorithms to add what it thinks are good adjustments in terms of exposure brightness and contrast. The problem lies in the fact that Lightroom, for a long time, ceased to be a “neutral” RAW handler. We all know how good Lightroom is – but it’s also a total pain in the arse!Īges ago, I did a post about Lightroom 5 and accurate colour HERE and, according to this blogs page-view stats, that post still gets a large global viewing figure every month – so it’s something of an on-going problem for a lot of users.īut things have moved on a bit since then, and we are now working with the v5 release of Lightroom 6/CC 2015 – and things haven’t got any better, sadly, from the perspective of actually “seeing what you captured”. You can avoid worms by masking out certain textures or by just having a generally softer photo.Lightroom – Neutralise Hidden Exposure Compensation. They're purely a result of sharpening, and they exist whether you use Lightroom, Irident or Photoshop sharpening or demosaicing. I've also done a ton of experimentation, and I disagree that the worms have anything to do with demosaicing. I'm going throught the same process and now turning everything off in x-transformer.

I find Iridient's default setting oversharpen and are super 'crunchy'. I had been using “default settings”, whatever that entails, so apparently it is time to change settings. If someone can do better on different software, I'd very much like to see it. The dpreview test shot from the X-T2 at ISO 12800. It really quite simple, not much extra work at all.

Then I can finish editing and add sharpening and NR (different than what I would use in LR alone). In Lr, after I've gone through them, usually cropping and pre-editing as I go, I will select the keepers and just process those through X-Transformer, all the cropping and editing carry over into the DNGs. I always save the original RAFs (you never know what better processor might come along). The worms are not a product of LR sharpening, they are demosaiicing errors that are accentuated by sharpening. If you use it correctly, it works just fine with properly demosaiiced files. Do all your NR and sharpening in Lightroom, yes, I said Lightroom. I also let it handle the lens corrections, which is identical to LR. You want to just use for its superior demosaiicing algorithm. Set it for MORE DETAILED (actually doesn’t make much difference), Set the Iridient Sharpening and NR to NONE, it just changed with the last update, but it probably still sucks - it adds all sorts of ugly artifacts, particularly at high ISOs. I have done extensive experimentation with XT/Lightroom and have come to the same conclusions as some others who've been at this a while.

Iridient developer vs lightroom