Photograph Works

Sharpening X-Trans Files In Lightroom

the roof of Norwich Cathedral

To see a larger version, click the photo.

I just read an article from 2014 by Peter Bridgwood on sharpening X-Trans files in Lightroom 5.

There’s a video later in his blog in which he discusses sharpening in Lightroom version 6.1 (it’s the same, more or less).

[The current version of Lightroom is 6.1.2]

I am posting this particular shot of the roof at Norwich Cathedral because it happened to be the file I picked out to work on in Lightroom. I sharpened the file as I wanted and exported the file to my desktop.

I then followed the article on sharpening X-Trans files in Lightroom 5 and redid the sharpening using Peter Bridgwood’s ‘standard’ sharpening.

Finally, I opened the two files in Photoshop and looked at them side by side. Peter Bridgwood’s standard sharpening is less aggressive than I had used, and it looked better.

Education Is A Morality Play

And the moral of this is that although today was an exception, I still find it painful to get down and actually think about what I am doing rather than just slide the controls in Lightroom or Photoshop without much thoughtful analysis.

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Comments

7 responses to “Sharpening X-Trans Files In Lightroom”

  1. colderweather

    Not sure what X-trans files are. I sometimes sharpen, gently, in the Camera Raw function in Photoshop. I slide, while having it in 100% view … I don’t even know what ‘masking’ really does.

    I no longer feel the same excitement about Photoshop and all that stuff. Life moves on, I guess … and I doubt photography was my ‘true calling’ 🙂. I didn’t seem to have the energy to learn [or capability even] … about focal length and all that.

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    1. David Bennett

      X-trans files are Fuji’s patented random arrangement of the photocells in the sensor compared to the regular arrangement of cells in Bayer files. (Most camera sensors are Bayer.) Yes, life moves on. I get a thrill thinking of places I am going to go with my camera, so I guess I have the bug.

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      1. colderweather

        I used to get up real early in the morning, and to out to the park to shoot birds. Couldn’t wait. Last Sweden-trip I didn’t even bring the DSLR camera, only the little one. It does feel a little sad …

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        1. David Bennett

          The world is rushing on. I am reading ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Harari. I am at the part where he is talking about the mass extinctions of animals that happened wherever man, the hunter-gatherer, went as he expanded across the globe thousands of years ago. It gives me hope for the future. I have been sad – very sad – and angry – about the destruction of nature that I love and care about so much. So now to read that we humans have been destroying animals for millennia – somehow it makes me more optimistic because with the huge power we have now, we have more awareness and maybe for the first time in history there is a movement to protect and conserve.

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          1. colderweather

            Yes, that’s interesting … the part about mass extinctions wherever man went. What’s _wrong_ with us?! Usually that give me a feeling of hopelessness, but the thought of that it’s been going on like ‘forever’, is strangely encouraging. Last night on TV they were talking about Canada’s wildlife, and how much it’s gone down recently … it was so saddening.

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            1. David Bennett

              When I went to university, we were given a reading list of books to read before the year started. One of them was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I didn’t read it then and I didn’t read it until years later. Then I thought that the 1950s and 1960s were the ‘innocent’ years when people didn’t one-hundred-percent know what the effect of their actions was. But now – now when we have so much science and evidence.

              So yes – as you say, it’s encouraging to know that while we are brute killers, maybe we are learning.

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              1. Array

                Ignorance has certainly played a big part in all this … like when someone (I think it was Göring 🙂 ) imported a few raccoons to Europe … heh!

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