I really love Fujifilm cameras for a whole host of reasons. One of them being their straight out of camera jpegs. Yes I know – you have probably never heard that statement before.
The main reason for my love of straight out of camera jpegs, is that I really dislike editing images. In part because I like to spend less time in front of a screen.
But digging a bit deeper and sprinkling a pinch of introspection on top, the real reason is that I am not very good at it. Straight out of camera jpegs beats what I am able to achieve in post processing. Hence of course I prefer the option that not only produces a quicker result but also a better result.
I am also putting up some hoops for myself to pass through as I use Ubuntu as the main operating system and hence cannot easily use the “standard” editing software solutions. This has “left” me with Darktable as my preferred editor and I have not really been able to get the full hang of it.
Recently I made a breakthrough.
I was finally able to “beat” the straight out of camera black & white images from my Fujifilm X-Pro3 with an edited version from Darktable. Although this may sound like a small victory it is a substantial step for me. I have not been able to get a sharper, more detailed and less noisy image, that still had the overall feel that I wanted, from an edited Raw file.


I have been using a variant of a Tri-X “recipe” for my black and white images for the last couple of years. For a lot of scenarios it makes amazing images straight out of camera. Especially scenes where there is a very clear subject in the foreground. But where I have found it lacking is in scenarios where the subject is further in the background. Then the grain that I love for close-up subjects becomes too pronounced and combined with the contrast washes out the subject if it is placed further in the background.




Writing this and inserting the images with the caption I can see that once the images are compressed and shown on a smaller screen, then the difference becomes less pronounced. But on a bigger screen in full resolution I can really see a difference.
The added benefit of this raw-editing is of course that I can apply the same procedures to files from my Nikon ZF camera and produce coherent results.



What the attentive reader will by now have realized is that I used the Nikon ZF image as “header/feature” image for my blog post on Fujifilm.
You cannot trust anything on the internet these days.
I plan on doing a very long write-up on my Nikon ZF at some point as I have had the most schizophrenic journey with it. Deciding to sell it one day, loving it the next. Over and over again. Now for over 6 months as far as I can see. I think I have decided to fully keep it by now. But I ave not finished my long document which I added paragraphs to every time I reconsidered.
So at some point I will try to condense and write a coherent piece on the Nikon ZF.
Until then. Have a wonderful day!
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