About Thomas Fitzgerald

Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography. 

A Very Quick first look at Aperture's X-Pro1 / XE1 Raw Support

As mentioned earlier, Apple have updated their camera raw support to finally bring Aperture and iPhoto support for Fuji's X-Trans camera's raw files. I've downloaded the Camera Raw update and I've been playing around for the last little while, and I have to say, I'm extremely impressed. I haven't given it a full run through, but already I like what I see. The files seem to be much sharper and retain much more detail that Lightroom's efforts, and it doesn't mangle fine detail like Lightroom does. It's really impressive, and I'm glad Apple took the time to do X-Trans support right. Here's a quick example of what I mean. This is an image that I took recently. This is at the default settings.

Here's the full image first:

DSCF2410

Now, here's a crop of the trees from Lightroom:

Lightroom

Notice the trees are smeary and soft.

Here's the same image in Aperture:

Aperture

It's sharper and more natural and there's none of the smeariness. You can't see it as dramatically from the crop, but when you're looking at the full image on a big screen you can see the difference quite starkly. Aperture also seems to retain far more colour, although it's at the expense of some artefacts. Here's another example that show's what I mean:

This is a crop from Lightroom:

Trees LR

here's the same image processed in Aperture:

Trees ap

There's much more colour in the trees, where as Lightroom's version is mostly grey. Again, these are both default conversions. You can see some of the speckles that have been introduced though. You can minimise these by turning up the "moire" slider in the raw fine tuning tab, but I'm amazed by the difference in colour.

Here's the full image so you can see the area:

DSCF2443

Anyway, that's it for now. It's late here, so I'll have a better look tomorrow and do some more detailed analysis, but my initial reaction is very positive and I'm actually quite impressed!

More to come!

 

A Second Look at Fuji X-Trans (X-Pro1, X-E1, etc) and Aperture - Not So Good After All

Aperture Gets Fuji X-Trans Support. XE1, X-Pro 1, X100s and X20 Raw Files Now Supported