articles/Review/fujigfx50s-page5
by Tom Lee Published 01/04/2017
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News or magazine print never does justice to photographic images, but hopefully you can see the quality of what is produced here. So, how impressed was I? I ordered and paid for a GFX on the spot and I have a brand new addition to my imaging family.
Post-processing Raw files was a bit of an issue for about a week, until Adobe updated their ACR processor. The only way to do this at the time was with something called ‘Silkypix’, but take my word for it ‘It’s Goddam Awful’. You can download for free from the Fuji website if you don’t believe me, but you’ll be wasting your time. I still take images using Raw+Superfine settings for the moment but ACR has now been updated with full support for the GFX and conversion is no longer an issue. The caveat here is of course you need the latest version of Photoshop and ACR to convert in this way. You can use a DNG converter from Adobe now that they support the GFX, so having an older version of Photoshop doesn’t preclude you from shooting in Raw.
Given my love affair with the XT2, why did I feel the need for this camera? I always remember the good old days of film – we had terrific 35mm Canons and Nikons, but the stamp of a true professional was their medium format kit. Hasselblad, Pentax, Bronica, Mamiya … it was a mark of ‘Quality’.
There is a propensity for photographers to tweak the hell out of their images in post-production, some out of a creative bent, but mostly ‘just because we can’. If you are in the latter group then this camera is not for you. These images are so pure that filtering the crap out of them defeats the object of having a precision instrument like this. I want a return to undiluted quality in my studio portraiture, and this instrument gives me that feeling that I think many of us have lost in this digital age. I’ll still do my art creations and fine art composites, but this will be the preserve of my XT2. This doesn’t mean I won’t need to post-process the images, far from it, but the DNA of this camera means that tweaking will be minimal and generally the removal of scene blemishes rather than wholesale manipulation.
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