In my series of posts about demosaicing the Fuji X-Pro1's X-Trans sensor, I pointed out considerable chroma smearing in the the raw conversion from a beta version of Adobe Camera Raw. I also clearly pointed out that a beta is, well, a beta, and that hopefully the Camera Raw team would improve the situation in a final release. But I also pointed out that I very much doubted whether Adobe would have allowed DPReview access to a beta that wasn't a good representation of the final product.

Lightroom 4.1 final is now out, with support for the Fuji X-Pro1, so we can expect a final version of ACR with X-Pro1 support very soon as well.
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There have been a few questions about why the Leica M Monchrom doesn't have the compression options for DNG files that the M8 and the M9 have.

I certainly can't claim to know what drove Leica's design decisions, but I can make a informed guess as to what drove the lack of compression options:

In the Leica M8 and M9, DNG compression is done by using a tone curve (somewhat like an sRGB tone curve) to reduce the data width from 14 bits to 8 bits.

I previously wrote about the Leica M Monochrom's sensor in this post. In summary, what I said was that I doubted that the sensor was simple a "naked sensor"  - in order to get reasonable spectral sensitivity, there would have to be a filter of some sort.

Leica have now published the spectral sensitivity of the sensor - you can find it here. Leica provide both a graph of spectral sensitivity, and a visualization of the Leica M Monochrom versus Kodak T-Max 400 film.

Yes. Part three. The previous posts about Demosaicing the Fuji X-Pro1 are here and here.

This post follows on from the previous two by showing how to get demosaicing that is, for practical purposes, as good as SILKYPIX, the best of the  Fuji X-Pro1 raw developers I tested in the previous posts.

In post one, I noted the chroma smearing that was very evident in the Adobe Camera Beta conversion, and to a lesser extent in the SILKYPIX conversion.
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My previous two posts about the Fuji X-Pro1 ( here and here) drew some interesting (and amusing) comments on the web. What those comments did show is that there's a lot of misunderstanding about how the relationship between camera manufacturers and software developers works.

Again, this is my (quite cynical) viewpoint - take it for what it's worth.

In short, there's actually far less of a relationship than most people seem to assume.
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Jono Slack over on the L-Camera-Forum was kind enough to post a raw DNG from Leica's new M Monochrom, so I a took a bit of a root around inside it. No surprises - it's very similar to a M9 DNG. For those interested, there's a field level dump of the interesting fields below, but the highlights are: 14 Bit data, much the same as an M9, with non-zero black level Uncompressed DNG version 1.0.0.0, so still the original DNG spec, none of the new stuff Camera name specified as "M9 monochrom" The MakerNote with its lens info still seems to be as for the M9; in this case the lens shows as "Apo-Summicron-M 75mm f/2 ASPH", which is consistent with what Jono reported The famous "blue dot" is still there The only thing that might surprise a few people is the "PhotometricInterpretation: LinearRaw" part. But that's actually quite correct - the way the DNG spec works, you can either set that to CFA (aka a Bayer array type camera) or to LinearRaw. And this sure isn't a CFA camera. There is one slight side effect of LinearRaw though. When ACR or Lightroom load a normal raw, they apply a tone curve by default. However, with a LinearRaw, they don't. So, for those intent on comparing a M9 image to a M Monochrom image shot side-by-side, be aware that by default they have different tone curves. I'd guess that once the M Monochrom is shipping ACR and LR will have a built-in M Monochrom camera profile that will probably have a tone curve. The other issue to be aware of with LinearRaw is that most raw development programs don't support it, so until Aperture, Capture One, etc are updated, don't expect M Monochrom DNGs to load in much except Adobe products.

This post is a follow-on to my previous post on Demosaicing the  Fuji X-Pro1.

I was somewhat bemused to find that the original post, which was a largely technical article, was picked up on a number of photography news sites.  Anything with "Demosaicing" in the title should have been a dead give away that the content wasn't really light reading.  Some of the interpretations and comments on the forums were "interesting" to say the least.
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Update: There's now a part 2 to this post and also a part three

Looks like it's the time for oddball sensors. Or for me to write about them anyway. I've just finished updating PhotoRaw for the Fuji X-Pro1, and I thought it was worthwhile to document the journey, and what it means for the X-Pro1's X-Trans sensor. Specifically, whether it will deliver on the claims that Fuji has made for it.
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Leica's just announced the M Monochrom - essentially a Leica M9 with a monochrome sensor, although apparently calling it a "M9 Monochrom" is bad. Very bad!

Now the M Monochrom isn't for me - I do a lot of monochrome photography, but the way I work is  by using channel mixing to get the same effect as the red, yellow, etc filters that I used to use back when I first learned photography using my father's old rangefinder camera.
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There's a good article, complete with a step-by-step guide, on using CornerFix with the 15mm Voigtlander Super Wide Heliar f/4.5 Asph. Well worth the read. The photographs are pretty good as well.

Check it out here.
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