Image Editing Experiments With The Fujifilm X-T2 and Film Simulation JPEGS

Fujifilm X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 19.4mm; 1/350th sec. @ f/11; ISO 200
JPEG; Classic Chrome; Shadows +2; Highlights +2; Color +2; Sharpness -2
Except for a little vignetting and sharpening added, this is pretty much straight
out of the camera.  (click to enlarge)

Yesterday I was out wandering through the countryside with my Fujifilm X-T2.  It was a nice early autumn day and I wanted to get out and just drive through the back roads of the nearby countryside to see what I could find.  Also, I am starting to embark on a little experimentation with the Fujifilm film simulations and their resultant JPEG files.  Yesterday was a good day for experimentation.

I found this little white clapboard country church, with its graveyard, and thought it was a nice subject for a bit of photography as well as experimentation.  The sun was shining directly on the front of the church and the shadows were very deep.  With this subject, could a JPEG, even one purposely set for high contrast, be a decent substitute for a RAW image in this case?

Wanting to create something dramatic as opposed to my normal style for realistic renditions in my images, I set the film simulation on the Q-menu to Classic Chrome, with +2 for the highlights and +2 for the shadows.  I also set color to +2 but set the sharpening to -2.  I think Lightroom shows fewer edge artifacts than using the camera's sharpening algorithm so I planned to do the final sharpening in editing.

The result is what you see above.  Just for reference and to see if a JPEG, taken under these extreme circumstances, would hold detail in the highlights and shadows, below is the same image edited as I normally would edit one of my images.  This tells me that even with Fujifilm JPEGs and high contrast, there is ample room to recover highlights and shadows if one wanted to primarily use the film simulations instead of RAW.

(click to enlarge)

Same scene, however with film simulation set to Acros with the Red filter.  Highlights set to +1, shadows set to +1.  Going for drama and something different.  I'm not displaying it here, but again, I was able to recover all of the shadow detail so everything fit between the edges of the histogram.

Fujifilm X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 16mm; 1/350th sec. @ f/11; ISO 200
JPEG; Acros R film simulation Shadows +1, Highlights +1;
Again, when playing with editing, I was able to easily pull up all the shadows so no detail was lost.
(click to enlarge)

I also saw this little scene in the corner of a marina.  I thought the color combination (all the primary colors) and juxtapositions of the objects was interesting to me.  The subject itself is mundane and really unremarkable, however.  Again, an experiment with color, contrast and quality.

Fujfilm X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 33.2mm; 1/1600th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 200
JPEG; Classic Chrome; Shadows +2; Highlights +2; Color +2; Sharpness -2
(click to enlarge)

I plan on continuing to experiment and see what I can find that is interesting and what pleases me with the film simulation built into my X-T2.  Recently, I had written about feeling a bit stale photographically and wanting to change from what I have normally photographed over the past 4 1/2 decades.  One of the ideas that intrigued me was the work of William Eggleston.  This Coca Cola image reminds me of something he might photograph.  Mundane, yet interesting somehow.

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

All content on this blog is © 2013-2017 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.