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. 

My new Fuji Jpeg Guide is now Available

My new Fuji Jpeg Guide is now Available

I’m happy to announce that my latest in a series of guides for Fuji X-Series cameras is now available. The official title is “Fuji Jpegs: A Guide to Shooting and Processing” is a 76-page guide with tips and techniques for getting the best results when shooting with Fuji’s Jpeg engine.

The guide covers both things you can do in-camera and how to treat your images afterwards. I start by discussing why you would want to shoot JPEG in the first place. I outline some of the advantages and disadvantages of shooting the format, and I talk about the pros and cons of shooting Jpeg and RAW to separate cards on cameras with dual card slots. 

I then talk about some of the settings that you can change in-camera on Fuji X-series cameras, how things like shadow tone and highlight tone work. I also discuss noise reduction and sharpening settings, and how to optimise the in-camera jpegs for post-production.

This is followed by some more general shooting tips, including how I have my own X-Pro 2 set up, and some tips for avoiding camera shake, how to focus on tricky subjects and so on. I also offer a series of recipes. These are basically some suggestions for combinations of settings that you can use to achieve various effects in-camera.

Finally, I look at some tips for processing Jpegs. I look at ways to sharpen Jpegs based on the settings I had previously suggested, and I look at some other tips and tricks for different software. Specifically, I deal with Lightroom, Photoshop and Apple Photos. I also discuss Fuji’s own X-Raw studio and how to generate new Jpegs from RAW files in-camera. The guide also comes with some presets for Lightroom, designed to sharpen Jpegs and some Actions for Photoshop.

It’s the longest in this series of guides that I’ve written yet, and I hope people find it useful. I tried to pitch this guide at a broad audience in terms of experience level. I didn’t want to make it too “beginner” to put off more experienced readers, but I didn’t want to make it too advanced either. Similarly, it covers a broad range of topics, but I didn’t want to go too deep into any one, as not everyone has the same interests. It’s probably a little different from my other guides too, in that it focuses more on shooting rather than editing. 

Anyway, I have been quite nervous about launching it, because it is a little different, but it’s done now, so it's in the hands of the readers!

The guide will normally sell for €6.50 but I’m having a special launch price of €5 for the first two weeks. (The exact price depends on local Vat rates.) You can find out more details about it over on the store page, including a complete chapter breakdown, and a downloadable excerpt.

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