Tag Archives: #Digital technique

Tips and Technique

Maplewood—Second Visit

Last Autumn Kris Sabbatino and I paid a visit to old Boston & Maine Maplewood Station near Bethlehem, New Hampshire.

This old railway station has been abandoned for nearly a century.

Last weekend we paid a brief second visit to make photos in the stark wintery landscape.

Below are three versions of a RAW (NEF) file exposed using my Nikon Z6.

JPG scaled from unadjusted NEF file. In other words, there were no corrections to the appearance of the image.
Adjusted JPG; color temperature warmed; contrast reduced, shadows lightened, highlights darkened.
Scaled adjusted JPG; color temperature cooled, contrast increased, highlights darkened, shadows darkened.

Tracking the Light Posts Every Day!

photography, Tips and Technique

Foliage at Mp79 and Iridient Comparison.

Leave a comment

Yesterday, October 15, 2020, I made a late season foliage photo of Conway Scenic Railroad’s Mountaineer descending from Crawfords at milepost 79 near the Arethusa Falls grade crossing.

Working with my FujiFilm XT1 and 90mm prime telephoto, I set the ISO to 1000. I needed relatively high sensitivity because I was working in the shadows of the trees and mountain side and wanted a sufficiently fast shutter speed to freeze the motion of the train, while using a smaller aperture to minimize headlight bleed.

Then I imported the Fuji RAW files directly into Adobe Lightroom for processing, while making a comparison set of files by importing them first into Iridient X-Transformer which converts the files to a DNG format and then imported these into Lightroom.

As previously described on Tracking the Light, the Iridient software does a superior job of interpreting the Fuji RAW files.

See comparisons below.

Fuji RAW file processed by Adobe Lightroom and adjusted for color balance and saturation in post processing.
Fuji RAW file processed by Iridient X-Transformer and adjusted for color balance and saturation in post processing.
Close up of the Fuji RAW processed by Adobe Lightroom.
Close up of the Fuji RAW processed by Iridient X-Transformer. Notice the superior clarity of hard edges and better definition at the edge of the headlights.

Tracking the Light Posts Every Day!