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Foreword Ever since Fujifilm introduced the first X-Series camera, the company has won a lot of praise from its users for the quality of its JPEGs. Fuji s cameras produce excellent quality JPEGs, but getting the most out of them can still require some extra thinking. There are lots of options that you can set, and many of the ways of working with JPEGs in a Fuji camera are different from those of most other manufacturers. In this guide, we will take a look at the various in-camera settings that you can change on a Fuji x-series camera and how these changes will affect your output when shooting JPEGs. We also look at various other tips and tricks for shooting JPEGs as well as discussing some useful techniques for post-processing JPEGs, which can sometimes require a different approach than you would take when working with RAW. This book does not attempt to teach every aspect of photography or post-processing as it would require volumes of information to cover such a broad topic. Instead, it focuses on the parts of the process that are specific to shooting JPEGs on Fuji cameras, with a little extra information where appropriate. It is also designed as a starting point to find your style and technique. You shouldn't view the suggestions in this guide as the only way to approach shooting JPEGs with Fuji cameras, but they are the point of view of the author and how he approaches it. The intention is to give you ideas and a grounding in the fundamentals, so you can develop your personal way of working and your individual style. Important Note: The on-camera instructions in this guide which refer to the camera menus, are based on the Fujifilm X-Pro 2. Because there are differences between the menu layout in many of Fuji s cameras, some of the menu locations referred to in this guide may be in a different place on your camera. Please consult your manual if the menu item isn't where it is specified in this guide. Note: All of the photos in this guide were either shot as Jpeg or converted using X-Raw studio to Jpegs 2
Foreword 2 Chapter 1: Introduction 6 Why shoot JPEG? 6 How JPEGs work (the super simple version) 7 Some advantages of shooting JPEG 9 Speed 9 The look is baked-in." 9 Immediate use with mobile devices 10 Tempering Expectations - The Disadvantages of JPEG 10 Advantages and disadvantages of shooting Raw and JPEG to separate cards 12 Chapter 2: Shooting Settings 14 Technical settings 15 Noise Reduction 15 Long exposure noise reduction 16 Sharpening 17 Creative Settings 17 Film Simulation Modes 18 Provia/STD 18 Astia/Soft 18 Velvia 18 Classic Chrome 19 Pro Neg Hi / Pro Neg Standard 19 Monochrome 19 Acros 19 Customisation Options 20 Shadow Tone 20 Highlight Tone 21 General Recommendations 22 Colour 22 Dynamic Range Expansion 23 How to Adjust Contrast 24 Saving your own Films 24 Method 1: Save Existing Settings 25 Method 2: Create Settings in the menu 25 Tip: Visualise the options with X-RAW Studio 26 Chapter 3: Tips for Shooting 27 3
How I have my X-Pro2 set up 28 General settings 28 Tripod shooting settings 29 The EVF effect 30 How To Read a Histogram 30 Highlight Clipping Warning 31 White Balance 32 Setting a White Balance Shift 33 Manually setting White Balance with a grey card 34 Avoiding Camera Shake and Shutter Shock 35 Using the Electronic Shutter 35 Focus Tricks 36 Bracketing 37 Self-timer for long exposure shooting 37 Chapter 4: Shooting Recipes 38 Recipe 1: The everyday go-to Look! 39 Recipe 2: The Bright Film Look 40 Recipe 3: The Street Photography Monochrome Look 41 Recipe 4: Muted Brown Look 42 Recipe 5: Punchy Velvia Look 43 Recipe 6: Simple Portrait Look 44 Recipe 7: Vintage film look 44 Recipe 8: Flat or Fake Log Look 45 Recipe 9: Landscape 45 Chapter 5: Post Production 46 General Processing Techniques 47 Sharpening 47 White Balance and Colour 47 Creating a faded Film type Look with Curves 49 Grain 50 Lightroom Classic 51 Working with RAW + JPEG 51 Setting the preferences to import both RAW and JPEG files 52 Sharpening 52 Noise reduction 53 Grain 53 A note about VSCO film presets. 54 4
Lightroom CC 54 Working with Photoshop 55 Opening images and maintaining editability 56 Sharpening using Camera RAW (And also noise reduction) 57 Sharpening using filters 58 Unsharp Mask 58 High pass sharpening 59 Apple Photos 60 Managing RAW + JPEG Files in Apple Photos 61 Sharpening in Photos 63 Understanding the controls 63 How best to approach sharpening in Photos: 64 Basic Colour Correction in Photos 65 White Balance Sliders 65 Colour Cast: 66 Levels and Curves 66 Extending Photos 66 Using extensions 67 Using an external application 67 In camera conversion 68 Using Fujifilm X-RAW Studio 69 Conclusion 71 Next Steps 71 Appendix A: How to install Presets for Lightroom. 73 Lightroom Classic (and older versions of Lightroom) 73 Lightroom CC 2018 74 Appendix B: Photoshop Actions 75 How to Install the Actions 75 About the Included Actions 76 Dual Sharpen 76 Basic Unsharp Mask 76 Fuji from Zero Landscape Cleaner Oversample 76 Fuji from Zero Landscape Detail + Cleaner 76 Camera RAW Sharpen from Flattened 77 Curves Warm Up & Curves Cool Down 77 5
Chapter 1: Introduction Why shoot JPEG? There was a time when some people would probably have asked: why shoot RAW?". But today many people who might typically only ever shoot RAW may be tempted by the reputation of Fuji JPEGs. While shooting RAW will always give you the best image quality and the most flexibility, shooting JPEG has its advantages too. However, as with many things, the reality and myth of the Fuji JPEG engine have become somewhat blurred by hype on the internet, so it's important to understand the limitations of the format and temper your expectations accordingly. Later in this chapter, I will outline the disadvantages and the limitations of shooting JPEGs, but there are also some significant advantages. Before we get to that, lets first take a quick look at just how the JPEG format works inside a camera. 6
How JPEGs work (the super simple version) Shooting JPEG in-camera means that the files that come out are fully baked to use a metaphor. When you press the shutter button to take a photo, the light hits the image sensor, and that information then goes to the camera s onboard processor. If you were shooting RAW, this data would be dumped straight to the memory card, but when you shoot JPEG, it gets some additional processing to turn it into a regular image file. First of all, the image is demosaiced. When you shoot with a digital camera, light is captured by photosensitive elements in the image sensor. These sensor elements are covered with a colour filter that is made up of a repeating pattern of red green and blue components. This array filters the light falling onto the individual sensor pixels, and this creates a pattern of red green and blue information that then needs to be put back together into a single colour pixel. This is done by interpreting the colours from each filter photosite with the ones around it to create a single RGB value for the pixel. It s a complicated process, and in the case of Fuji, it s made a little bit more complicated by the fact that the company uses their filter design, called X-Trans. This process is kind of like how an inkjet printer works, but in reverse, and its called demosaicing. Once the demosaicing process is complete, you get colour values to go with the brightness values captured directly off the sensor. If you were to view the information at this stage, the image would look flat and uninteresting. This is because the data coming directly from the sensor is in a linear colour space, but our eyes see in a logarithmic fashion. To counter this a tone curve is applied to the image. Every camera manufacturer uses their own tone curve, and this is part of the cameras look. In the case of Fuji's cameras, you have a degree of control over this through the use of the Shadow Tone and Highlight Tone options. 7
On top of that, the colour characteristics are set based on the film simulation mode that you chose. The image data also undergoes some additional processing, including the application of sharpening and noise reduction, based on the settings that you have set on the camera. Finally, this image file gets compressed and then written to the memory card in your camera. All of this happens in an instant, and that gives you an idea of the importance of the processor in your camera. The image processor is a dedicated microchip that is designed to do these operations almost instantaneously, but unlike the CPU in your computer, it s not intended for general purpose computing. This means that many processors have specific routines hard-coded into them, and while they are programmable to an extent, they also do certain things a certain way, based on the need to do them superfast, such as sharpening and noise reduction. This is also part of the limitation of JPEG. Because the processors are designed for speed, and even though modern ones are really powerful, they have their limitations. That s why when you shoot RAW, you can use different algorithms for things like sharpening and noise reduction, and because the computer doesn t have to do it in real time, it can optimise for quality rather than speed. While the processors in Fuji's cameras are really good, and produce high-quality images, they too have limitations. In my opinion, the quality of the sharpening and noise reduction, 8
while may be good compared to some other JPEG engines, is still not as good as the results you can get by performing these operations on a computer. Luckily you can turn these options down in camera and do a little processing afterwards to compensate, although in some cases you won t even need to. Some advantages of shooting JPEG Speed The distinct advantage is speed. Because the files are smaller, they write to the card faster, and they copy and open more quickly on your computer too. Also, because a lot of the work that is needed to decode a digital image is already done on the camera and baked into the JPEG, it means that working with JPEG files in an editor can be much faster too. While this is less of an issue with faster computers which can process RAW data reasonably quickly, editing a JPEG is still quicker for the most part. The look is baked-in." When shooting with Fuji s JPEG engine, the image gets its look baked into the file at the time of capture. The colour and tone curve of the image are set depending on the film simulation that you used, and this works almost like shooting with a specific type of film to use an analogue analogy. Even if you go on to edit your photo further to give it your own style, having this as a starting point can make a difference and speed up your workflow. While applying a colour profile to the RAW file may seem like the same thing, it behaves differently. That s not to say that the JPEG is better, it s just different. Editing a JPEG with the simulation profile applied will behave differently from editing a RAW file, just because of the nature of the two different types of formats. 9
Immediate use with mobile devices Another advantage of shooting with JPEGs is that you can send them straight to your mobile device by using the wifi in your camera (if your camera has wifi). Currently, you can t send RAW files this way, and so shooting JPEG means that you can post to Instagram or email photos right from your phone or tablet while out in the field, without having to even take the card out of the camera. Tempering Expectations - The Disadvantages of JPEG While the Fuji JPEG files have a great reputation and some people regard them as better than RAW, this distinction may be a little exaggerated. Fuji uses a high-quality algorithm for their film simulation profiles, and this means that the Fuji JPEG files have excellent colour. The compression engine in the Fuji processor is also pretty good so that photos often look great straight out of the camera. However, they are still JPEG files, and so there are limits to what you can do with them. As already mentioned, if you have the settings in the camera set a certain way, the JPEGs can still look heavily processed. There is a misconception perpetuated by various commentary and forums on the internet, that the only advantage to shooting RAW is to correct your mistakes. This just isn t true. RAW files, by their nature, contain much more data than JPEG files. They are mostly not compressed, or if they are in the case of certain Fuji cameras, that compression is just a lossless data compression. Because of that, they contain significantly more information than the average JPEG. So even if you don t do any changes, the RAW file will still contain more data, and be of a higher quality, even if that difference isn t immediately apparent. While you can edit JPEGs, there are limits to some extent, compared to editing RAW files. JPEG files will lose integrity the more you edit them. Because they have a limited amount of data, to begin with, the more you process that limited data, the quicker it degrades. Repeatedly editing and saving a JPEG file can also become an issue. 10
If you do need to change certain things in the image, such as the white balance, it can be a bit trickier with JPEG files. It s not impossible; you just need to take a different approach. If you have sharpened the JPEG in camera, it s difficult to remove over-sharpening in postproduction. Similarly, if you clip the highlights in a JPEG image, there is no way to recover them. With all the best will in the world, no matter how good you are there will be times when, either by accident, or by a set of circumstances beyond your control, you will make a mistake, and an otherwise perfect image may be limited because you had only shot JPEGs. With a RAW file, correcting such an error may be a simple matter of a slight tweak. I m not saying that you can t or shouldn t use JPEGs though (as that would defeat the purpose of this book), and people use JPEG files all the time. Its just important to understand that there are limitations and that the advantages of Fuji s JPEGs, in particular, have been somewhat exaggerated. That is why I recommend, even if you only intend to use the JPEG files, to shoot RAW + JPEG so you will at least have the option. It s also essential to make sure to take extra time before taking the shot to make sure you have the camera setup right, and the same can be said for after you shoot. There may be a stigma attached to checking your images on your camera due to the somewhat overhyped backlash against chimping". However, if you want to make sure you absolutely have the shot, especially if you re only shooting JPEG and will have limited options to fix it in post, then you re better off taking a second to make sure you have it and it s right rather than miss out because of an ideological opposition to checking your screen. You don t have to check every single image, but if a shot is important, it s worth making sure it s correct. 11
Advantages and disadvantages of shooting Raw and JPEG to separate cards If you re using a camera with dual card slots, there are several different options as to how to manage your RAW + JPEG files. One of those options is to split the writing of files so that RAW goes on one card and JPEG goes on the other. To enable this option, on the camera s menu go to: SET UP > SAVE DATA SETUP > CARD SLOT SETTINGS(STILL IMAGE) RAW / JPEG One of the advantages of shooting different formats to different cards is that you can easily import just the JPEG files onto a device in the field, and not have to worry about the RAW files when working with devices that don t give you options for managing both. For example, if you re working on a laptop or even an ipad, you may want to import just the JPEGs to get an idea of your work in progress, and then later import just the RAW files onto your main work computer for further processing. This can also be a useful way of working if you re spending time in the field, and want to post to social media quickly. Obviously, you can do this if shooting on a single card, but the process of separating the files is a bit more involved. I use this way of working particularly when travelling, and I have found it very useful. I like to import the JPEGs into Apple s Photos app on my MacBook Pro. As Photos doesn t provide any way to only import JPEGs from RAW + JPEG pairs, this way I don t have to go through the process of manually separating them. When returning from a trip, I can then work with the RAW files on my main computer if I need to. There are a few disadvantages of shooting this way though. For one, compared to using the write to both cards option, if you lose one of the cards then you don t have a backup of 12
both the RAW and JPEG files. The other issue is that having the RAW and JPEGs on separate cards breaks the RAW + JPEG pair connection that some software uses. It can also be slower to see previews when importing the RAW files because it won t have a corresponding full-size JPEG file to use as a preview. This can also affect the in-camera preview. If you have the RAW and JPEG pairs split across both card slots, then the camera defaults to using slot 1 when viewing images back in the camera. If you try to zoom in, you will only be able to zoom in so far, because it is trying to use the embedded preview of the RAW file rather than the larger resolution JPEG file. You can change the slot used for playback, by doing the following: PLAYBACK > MENU > CHANGE SLOTS However, this only remains in effect until the camera goes asleep, or if you turn it off. If this setting stuck, then it wouldn t be a problem, but you may find that you need to keep changing it every time, or just live with the lower resolution previews. It s up to each individual to weigh the pros and cons of each method. If you re shooting a critical project for a paying client, it s probably best to have the slots set to BACKUP to have copies of both RAW and JPEG. 13