JPEG Versus RAW Versus HDR With The Fujifilm X-T1

Bracketed DNG file created in Lightroom CC (click to enlarge)

Recently, I was out wandering around the countryside of southeastern Virginia looking for interesting things to photograph.  As I passed through a familiar location, I stopped to see what had changed with an old railroad depot I had photographed a number of times earlier.  As expected, it has become more dilapidated and continues to deteriorate.  I believe the current use of the building is that of a makeshift warehouse of some sort for a nearby feed company.

It was bright, sunny spring day with a gorgeous sky and I wanted to make the most of this type of day, since we don't get many with the puffy, white, cumulus clouds nicely spaced on a day with low humidity and bright sunshine.  I stopped to make some record photos of the old depot as it gives me an idea, year to year, at its rate of disintegration.

Since the day was so bright and the shadows were very deep, I thought I would three exposures a stop apart so as later have the ability to combine images and capture the detail of the shadows while retaining the full beauty of the bright white clouds and blue sky.  The dynamic range of the image was quite wide and I wasn't sure the X-Trans II sensor could capture all of it in one exposure.  It turns out, I needn't have done that as when I started editing the images, I was able to fully pull out all of the detail from the shadows as all of the highlight detail from the clouds—amazingly not only from the RAW image but from the JPEG as well!

Single RAF file (click to enlarge)

When I returned home, I started editing my images.  In this particular view of the front of the old station and the nearby tracks and surrounds, I chose three of the images I made 1 stop apart and used Lightroom CC 2015 to merge them into a 32-bit HDR DNG file.  I then edited that file to my taste.  All of the detail in the shadows and highlights were captured as I visualized at the scene.

As an experiment, I decided to see if I could replicate the three merged image file with the single RAW that was part of the three exposures.  No problem!  Wow!  My need for HDR just lessened.  I then tried editing the accompanying JPEG that I made (I have been using the RAW + JPEG setting) to replicate what I did with the merged DNG as well as the RAW file.  To my great surprise, I was able to pretty much exactly duplicate the three merged HDR image as well.  I think that is amazing.

Single JPEG file (click to enlarge)

In the end, I was able to produce three basically identical files (they are not totally identical since I didn't want to spend a lot of time finely tweaking every color, etc., setting but they are very, very close and work well for this illustration) from a 32-bit file created by merging three RAW images, a single RAW image (from one of those three) and the JPEG that was created along with the RAW.  Simply amazing compared to what was available to us as digital photographers only a few years ago.

This is another one of those posts that illustrates why it is important to thoroughly know your gear so when pressed or in a fast-moving or high stress situation, you don't have to guess what your gear can and cannot do.  For example, if I wanted to capture a moving object in a very high contrast scene, I may be hesitant to do so since I may have assumed that the X-T1's sensor couldn't possibly capture the entire dynamic range, when in fact, it could.  Now I know its capabilities.

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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