How to Edit Fujifilm X-Trans RAW Files in Lightroom (Filmic-Type Look)

What's going on? I'm gonna do a quick video, hopefully not too long, about my editing process and how I use Adobe Lightroom to achieve a particular look. I predominantly shoot with Fujifilm cameras. You can kind of see here some of my favorite cameras out of all the photos I have currently synced in this catalog. I love my X100V. I used to own an X E3. Love that camera. I have an XF10, X Pro 3 and X T3. Just recently got the X Pro 3. So what I wanted to do is look over some of those images and I also wanted to talk a little bit about how to avoid some of the poor Fuji X RAW file handling by Lightroom. And if you've done any research on it or if you heard anything, there's a lot of worms and artifacts that can come up when you process files. So we're going to show you a little way how to get rid of that. Also, I kind of want to go over some images of the XF35mm F1.4, which is a lens I got last month really late on it. It's a classic in the X mount system lineup and it's a fantastic lens. So we're just going to jump right into it. We're going to take a look at some photos I did recently at the beach in Newport Beach. Here is a photo that is edited. This is something that I did spend some time doing and you can kind of see some of the settings here on the right. So I'm not really sure what the look I go for is. I know I kind of like this sort of filmic look, but I wanted to show a couple of photos and see kind of how I get to that. Again, everyone's got kind of their own style, but I did kind of want to show what I think is achievable here. So let's kind of reset and let's just show before and after here. Or rather, excuse me, just before. So this is the photo straight out of camera. Fuji takes incredible photos in all of their systems and cameras. Really, really great stuff. So this is just an off the cuff photo with the 3514. So first thing I like to do, and I know this might be kind of sacrilegious, but especially when you're starting to get out and edit photos, one of the cool things to do is just use the auto option. Usually depending on what camera system you're using, you can get some pretty achievable results with the auto button. Obviously you can cheat, you know Kind of adjust to your liking. But I think a lot of times we're too afraid to do this. We're like, oh, my God, don't use Auto. If I'm going to be a real photographer, I need to go by hand. That's not true. You can kind of go whichever way you want. So I'm going to go to color profiles here. I'm going to go to some of the Fujifilm profiles here. These are some of the film simulations. You know, I really like classic Chrome. A lot of people. It's kind of like our favorite in the Fujifilm community. And I think it just gives a really cool result right out the way. So, as a matter of fact, I love this image right now. I think it's fine. I think it's great. I think it'll work. But I kind of want to show a few things. I would tweak if I was going to have time, but I would have already exported this had I not been filming this video. So one thing I like to do right off the bat is temperature. I'm going to warm this up a little bit and I'll show you what it looks like. When you get too warm, you really get this yellow cast. Obviously blue and too cool is going to be on the other side, but let's kind of find a happy medium here. I want to show you what Lightroom thinks it should be. That's too warm. I want to show you what Fuji thinks it should be. I agree with that. I am going to warm it up just a tad so you can kind of see some of the yellow casts coming to the rocks here. Exposure, I think, is pretty good. The Auto did a great job there. Contrast. I like to dip down the contrast a little bit so it's not so contrasty. Highlights. If you take them down all the way, it's going to be pretty flat image. So we do need a little bit of highlights here. The white point we can kind of pull down maybe a little bit there. Shadows. This is an interesting one. I only really want the shadows raised on the bird itself. So what I'm going to do actually is kind of lower the shadows closer to zero. I think around there is good. Take my adjustment brush. I'm going to pull up my shadows save option. If you don't have this in your lightroom, you can just create a new brush. I usually start at about 13 or 15 or so. So what I'm going to do is go in and paint. So holding down the space bar, I'm going to zoom in and then as it renders here, I'm going to actually grab just a smaller brush here. I'm just going to kind of start painting. I'm going to press O so that I can kind of see where I've painted. And then as I get down to the bigger parts of the wings here, I'm actually going to increase my size of my brush. And you can see some of my settings here. I don't use masks. I mean typically it'll show an auto mask right now I find that it does okay with that. I know some people say they use this click method instead of actually painting. But again, I think however you want to do, it's good. This is probably one of the most time consuming tasks. I do agree. I think this can really be a little challenging for some people because it does take a little bit of time. But auto mask is on. So I'm getting actually pretty damn good mask here. Pretty happy with that. I noticed the white isn't really getting masked there. So let's kind of pop that in here. And again we're going to raise the shadow so it won't really affect that too much. Let's minus some of that out. Let's go back to auto mask and let's kind of get this, this guy going again. Again, really interested in these parts here. And then the feet definitely I want because the feet I think are quite a bit too dark. Save some of those shadows there. So you'll see some overspray over paint there, whatever you want to call it. And you can just hold down alt kind of get rid of it. So happy with that. Let's see what it looks like without the mask and then we can kind of adjust here. So I think that looks really cool there. It looks a little unnatural, but I think it looks good. So cool. So we've got our bird rocking and rolling, showing clarity and texture here. I do like to use a little bit of clarity and texture. I know that's kind of faux pas. Don't overdo it. But I do think it looks nice. If you're doing a portrait or something, you probably should stay away from those sliders. Maybe pull them down a little bit, smooth out the skin for a lot of subjects. I think that works really well for this dehaze. I think again from my style, I think works really well. The more you dehaze going all the way to the right, you'll see just a con and everything kind of gets overwhelming. Now if I pull back dehaze a little bit, I'll get more of that kind of filmic look that I'm going for. So right about there is good. And again, I'm going to play with my contrast slider here. I don't want to pull it back too much because we're losing some of the blacks and the rocks here. Let's kind of pull it down to negative nine. I think that looks good there. Saturation of vibrance really depends. I think classic Chrome is pretty desaturated. But as we bring up the saturation, you'll notice the feet are getting really red. And I don't want that red popping out. So let's pull up the saturation about there. And I'm still unhappy with those feet right now. So we're going to leave all this alone, the HSL sliders. But I actually am going to go in here and kind of play with this and kind of desaturate those feet. It's going to affect the whole image. But I don't really have any reds anywhere else, so I think that'll be okay. I'm also going to pull down some of the luminance here just a tad. Now, the more I look at it and this happens when you're editing a lot, you're gonna notice that, oh, wow. Like, this is actually a bit too much of the shadow. So let's pull it down to like 35 and then the feet will kind of blend in again. So now we're at a point in the image where it does look pretty good for tone curve. Let's kind of just do the general S curve here. Get your three points. Not too much. In fact, that may be too much right there. I do, like fade. I know that's it's a little fun faux pas. But I do like to fade the image a bit. Get those shadows kind of faded out. Split toning. I'm not big on that. Again, I want to show you the sharpening here for Fuji. So by default, you don't really see the worms in this image, just because it's a different style of image. But had there been like a wall or something, you would have really seen it. I do like to mask every image I have with sharpening. Holding down the alt key on your keyboard or I think on Mac it might be option. I can't remember. But that'll give you that mask and kind of show you exactly what it's going to sharpen. It's going to sharpen the most contrast parts of the image. So kind of pulling up the contrast, the sharpening, rather Here I'll put my radius down to like 0.9 and we'll use the bird, which is in motion here. And I'm at 1 900th of a second and it's still kind of blurry. But I'm going to pull down my detail to about 15. You can kind of see by holding down alt what that looks like. Pretty happy with that. You know, there's a lot of out of focus here, a little bit blurry, but I'm really happy with that result there. Feels sharp, but not too, like digitally sharp. Leave everything else the same. I do like to use the default Fujifilm correction here and let me see if I can show you. So take a look at the corners. Kind of straightens it out a little bit. It's almost like a keystone, but I can't tell too much of a difference. I just feel like it looks better with it on. I don't know. Correct me if I'm wrong down below, but I love using auto transform. It really gets a good length on the image in terms of actually keeping some lines straight here. However, I don't think it's really doing too much for me. It's basically just cropping and rotating where I don't need that in this image. So I'm gonna keep it off the big one here. You know, for grain, I like to put 10 grain here. Depends on the image. Again, I do like that sort of soft grain. I'll keep the same size and the roughness at default. Going down to calibration, this is a crucial tool. I think a lot of people skip this. I think it really bears, you know, moving stuff around. So I'm going to take my red hue, which is really going to affect his legs here. Pull it kind of down a little bit. Kind of move it around, make it a little bit more orange. My green primary, I think I'm going to pull down this way a little bit and you're seeing everything starting to shift. My rocks are kind of turning more yellow now. Pull up the saturation on that. So I'm getting sort of a different vibe now in the image. And you'll really see it here. When I pull down the blues and kind of change that a little bit more aqua color. We can kind of pull down some of the saturation here and maybe even a little bit further. Now we're getting a much different feel here. This is almost like a Kodachrome kind of image in terms of some of the colors. So again, really happy with this at the moment. I do kind of Want a little bit more fade. And this is again personal preference. And some people hate the fade. But I just think it looks good because I really want these blacks crushed here. I think that would look pretty cool. So we'll put it there. Pretty happy with this image. So let's take a look at where we started. Started with a very flat image. I feel like there the white point is a little bit too high. So pulling that down and just really giving it that Filmic look again. The important part here was really raising the shadows on the wings and then the back tail wings of the bird here a little seag. But before and after. So warmer image. Definitely acquired look. But this is the look that I definitely like. So I would export this. Let me quickly show you a preset that I kind of came up with. It kind of gives a similar result called it's my Name Dylan Filmic. October 2020. I'll apply it and I'll get some of these. Play with my sliders here. And I've actually created a little bit of split toning in here too. But one of the cool things about this is you can actually kind of play with it. I have it set to kind of overexpose a little bit. And I kind of want to go all the way down here to where we were before in the history. And if we go from where we are right now to the image that I made pretty close. I probably saturated the blues a little bit too much. And then this doesn't include the highlight on the bird there, the adjustment brush. But I mean it's pretty close. And so again I probably prefer this image with the more saturated blues there than this image. But I think they both are pretty good. But the preset I have, I'll put it down below for you guys. You can download and play with it. But I think it does a pretty good job. So that's how I kind of do my images. We'll do one more here. I like this guy who is fishing. I had a couple of him. I want to see kind of which one I like the best. None of these are very remarkable. We can use one of these where I was kind of approaching him listening to music there. So this one's doable. We're going to do some more work on this one. He's way too dark. But let's first hit auto a little bit too oversaturated there. So let's pull down the vibrance there. I'm really annoyed with this horizon. So again, auto transform should take care of that for Us. Beautiful. And it really does. It really gets that really even line. So taking a look at some of the other things, first thing I usually do is sharpening. Like I said, I try not to do the main sliders yet. I try to play with the sharpening. I want to get him sharp, but I don't want him to kind of pop out too much. And it's kind of tough because focus is a little bit off on him. A little bit soft. Pull down my radius. Definitely pull down my detail to about there. So so far, we've got a very working image. Big thing I want to do here is get him boosted. So we'll kind of hit O here and we'll do kind of our auto mask. I believe it's still on. Yeah. So we'll kind of paint him through. You can see the auto mask does a pretty good job of finding the edges. And I'll kind of get through there and kind of paint him through and through. And some of the over painting. Like I said, it's easy to remove. I don't know if I want that painted necessarily, but I think that'll look kind of cool. Let's get his fingers there. Not that one. So let's get rid of some of this down here. We don't want those rocks to be very shadow. We want those shadows there. We're missing some on his face here. So we'll do the click method here. Get some of that out. Great. And then some of the overspray on top. Cool. So he is nicely painted. We'll turn off the mask by putting O Bruce the shadows a little bit. So it kind of gives an HDR look. But I feel like it's the definitely doable. Raise exposure, pull the contrast down a little bit. Dehaze him maybe a little bit. Give you kind of a nice balance there. So again, for the purposes of time, I'm actually going to apply my preset here. It's going to remove the transform. So let's go and put our lens adjustment there. And let's double check the sharpening because that was also reset. Cool. And then let's go down to the transform. Auto cool. So a little overexposed. You can see it in your histogram. I'm a little bit too far to the right, but if I kind of pull it down a little bit, we'll get it back here. I kind of want to play with this mask again because now he's. I don't feel like he's. There's a little bit of area there. To clean up. I don't feel like he's still a little bit too dark for my taste. So let's pull up maybe 50. This is a lot and I totally see that. But I think, you know, it definitely looks good here. What I'll do for the rest of the image too. Did that save? Let's see. Yeah, there we go. Pull up a contrast on him another half. Stop there. Cool. So let's kind of pull this down a little bit. And then it's really the white point. That's a little bit too much here. So let's pull down our white point without losing too much detail here. And too much depth raises contrast. It's all about adjustments. It's all about finding that balance between your shadow subject and the rest of the image. So I quite like this. At this point. I am going to crop. This is something I don't normally do. I'm not a big cropping editor. But I am going to kind of rule a thirds him in here. And that's difficult for me on crops. I can never really find a spot that I really like. But I'm going to try to rule thirds him there. Try that. I think that looks a lot better. I still feel like my horizon's a little bit off and sometimes the auto transform will do that. But the cool thing is. Yeah, it's a little bit off there on the right if you see. But the cool thing is you can kind of rotate from here. And I feel like that's pretty good there. And I want to constrain the crop in case it introduces any white space. And there you go. There's our kind of finished image and we can play around with it for hours and hours. But I think this is a really good starting point. Again, this preset that I've kind of created is really nice and I think you can do a lot with it if you're looking for this filmic look. One of the big things in this preset and in my color science that I try to grade it as is you're going to get some of these aqua y blues and some of this really flat image. I pulled down the highlights all the way on this image because I noticed that more and more I pulled them out. The sky is just too much. And as one last thing just to show before we go is pulling down the. The graduated filter here. I can kind of darken out this sky here. So let's. Let's kind of mask it here. We just want about that. In fact, I don't really want so if I pull on my luminous mask, I don't want these rocks being touched. So if I actually pull up, I can show the luminance mask. I just want the real light area there. So let's see if we can kind of get that affected there. So you'll see it's kind of pulling back off the rocks and kind of just hitting the sky pretty nicely. Don't want to do that. Let's pull this down just a little bit. Cool. That's too much there. Let's just kind of pull this down a little bit. And you'll kind of see what I'm going for is I'm trying to. There's a little bit of white space there to the right that I haven't touched. But we'll press done there. And what we'll do is we're not doing shadows there. Just kind of lower the contrast here. Oh, this is on a new one. Sorry. All right, here we go. So let's pull this down and then let's kind of pull this down a little bit. If you keep going, I mean, it looks dark and it looks very unnatural. But if I just kind of pull it down a little bit and then even more, trying to soften those highlights, I think that looks pretty good. It's a little unnatural, but again, gives us more kind of focus on him. Another thing you could do is just do a Dodge and burn. And in this case we're going to burn a little bit. So pulling up from the bottom here, kind of from the sides, and then actually, let's see. It's a little bit too dark on the top, so we'll leave that there. Get rid of that last one. Yeah. So now we've come up with a little bit moodier image. We're probably going to bring our exposure up because we darkened them out quite a bit. But again, you could sit here and play this with this for hours. But you got to find something that you're comfortable with. So that's all I wanted to show today. I'll go ahead and leave the link for the preset down below. You can check it out. I mean, presets are presets. They're not going to work great on everything. This is really set for Fujis cameras and classic chrome and whatnot. I think it looks really well with that. So take a look, see what you think. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.