Another reason to shoot raw

I've posted various articles about the technical advantages of shooting raw already, and in the end its all about preservation of the maximum image quality that can be achieved. A valid question may be: why should I do that?

Post processing, thats why. I switched from the free Rawtherapee (during an excursion to Linux as my main desktop OS) to Windows-based Rawshooter (discontinued, still available for download, but doesn't support newer cameras because Adobe bought Pixmantec off the market) and then to Lightroom. Besides the fact that - IMHO - each program was a step towards better post processing possibilities, there was one major change over time: my own post processing skills. I know how to get more out of the software that I'm using.

Nothing works better than an example, so here we go...


"Autumnlight v1" (Octobre 2007, Nikon D70s, AF-S VR DX Nikkor 18-200mm)

And for comparison the new edit:


"Autumnlight v2" (Octobre 2007, Nikon D70s, AF-S VR DX Nikkor 18-200mm)

What I can immedatiately see in the new version is:

1. better colors: a clear advantage of the development that went into ACR and the camera profiles - the birch leaves were not orange like in the first version, they were yellow!
   
2. better shadows: the original version was edited on an uncalibrated display - one of the most important things about calibration: correct gamma! In fact, the print of this photo was so disappointing because my display was not calibrated.
3. better detail & less noise thanks to the finer sharpening controls in Lightroom
4. blue tint on the right side is gone: the blue tint on the shadow part on the right was removed by simply reducing the blue saturation in Lightroom
   

Would it have been possible to make the same edits to an 8-bit JPEG that came straight out of the camera? I don't think so. I do regret that some of the shots from my earliest days with the D70 were made only as JPEGs. But I also remember how confusing and bothersome the development of raw files seemed in the beginning.

I want to add a final note about post processing: maybe neither of the two photos above is "real" and "true". I can't remember what the scene looked like in Octobre 2007. But I do know that I found the early morning light, the fog and the warm colours of the leaves the most important part of the scene, and I think that I have been able to carve out that quality in the new edit much better.

Birches and Ghosts in the Ibmer Moor

"Birch Ghosts" (panning) • Ibmer Moor, Austria

Another photo with panning (previous examples are here and here). I am fascinated how weird the birches look. Happens only in the black/white version, something like a "negative" or maybe even "x-ray" effect. Here's a different photo in color:


"Birch Chaos" (panning) • Ibmer Moor, Austria

Not quite as nice as the black/white version, and very nervous, too, isn't it? The last photo is another attempt at working with negative clarity in Lightroom (there are no local adjustsments in this photo, only negative clarity):


Birches, softened • Ibmer Moor, Austria

I like this one very much. It has a somewhat mystic (or maybe eerie?), detached quality. Gaaaawd, its the end of January and I'm so longing for spring. I want the colors back, but I'd say I'll have to wait until April. :-/

An attempt to talk about metering

Reed in backlight • January 7th 2009, near Überackern, Austria

This strong backlight scene of the dry leftovers from last years reed was taken close to sunset (3:45pm). The exposure was corrected by something like -1.0 in Lightroom to work out the solar disc a little more. Once more, thanks to the S5pro's excellent dynamic range I didn't have to worry a lot about the exposure - I can use matrix (pattern) metering most of the time. With the D70s, I had to fiddle around with exposure compensation a lot more to avoid blown out highlights, and the above photo would've been a candidate for quite some of it - I'd guess something between -1.33 and -2.0 EV, because of the large amount of darker areas.

I never wrote much about exposure metering before because the web is full of it. But there's one simple rule that I haven't read anywhere (it may well be that I just haven't searched hard enough): you just have to think like the camera's built-in light meter. Or rather, you have to understand what the light meter in the camera thinks.

I don't want to repeat the obvious and explain the "blindness" of light meters in details - they only and always give you an exposure suggestion that is OK for a reflection of 18% grey (which looks more like 50% brightness to us, but thats a different story), because thats all it can see. The two examples where this technique fails are familiar: the bride in her white dress in the snow would end up underexposed, and the black cat in the coal cellar would be overexposed if you'd just follow the exposure suggestion of the light meter in your camera - at least for "standard" metering methods like spot and center weighted (integral) metering.

Whats more problematic is that matrix (or pattern) metering adds some sort of intelligence to it. Problematic in a way that you don't know what will happen. Matrix metering divides a scene into certain key areas, and compares what it sees, luminance-wise, with an enormous amount of similar scenes stored somewhere in the cameras circuits, trying to determine what would be the best exposure. Matrix metering knows that you're taking a photo of a bride in the snow, and adjusts the exposure for you (at least in theory).

Therefore, the camera manual says that matrix metering and exposure compensation don't mix very well, and that you should NOT use exposure compensation with matrix metering because the logic in the camera already KNOWS that an exposure compensation is needed for this and that type of scene - it is already taken care of in the exposure suggestion of the camera. Just like everybody else, after a while I learned where the logic would fail nevertheless, because a lot of factors add to it - the active autofocus area, for example, or the distance to focus (for lenses that supply this information to the camera, marked "D" for "distance" in the Nikon world).

But what will happen when you try to make a photo of a person in a room that stands against a bright window? Who knows what the matrix metering will do? If you point the AF sensor on the person, it will completely blow out the highlights in the windows, but if you don't, the person will be a pitch black silhouette (sidenote: thats a crappy example, because the real solution is to use fill flash). These were the situations where the results of matrix metering always were somewhat puzzling for me.

So, when I'm facing tricky exposures, I'm using spot metering. I meter an area of a scene that is "neutral", exposure wise (18% grey...) and adjust the exposure for that. I found that this works best in manual mode, because framing the scene is an entirely different thing than metering in that case. Another approach is to meter the brightest spot and then overexpose - depending on the camera, more or less is possible here (again, it depends on how bright the brightest spot really is and how bright YOU think it is). I have yet to make my own tests with the Fuji S5pro.

Another quite lengthy article. Damn. I'm writing this as a sort of lesson for myself. Its the classic situation: the moment you explain something to someone else, you understand it perfectly clear for the first time. I hope that moment lasts! :-)

Film is true? Digital is fake?

One week ago on thursday in the evening the bavarian television station "BR" aired their "Capriccio" magazine, and it featured a portrait of National Geographic photographer Norbert Rosing from Germany and his book "Wildes Deutschland" (best translated as "German Wilderness", perhaps) - the book is about unknown and surprising sights and sites in Germany, and in the TV show they also showed super photos from the polar regions that Rosing travelled many times - photos with the Aurora Borealis, solar halos, etc. etc. - all in all, very very impressive.

One of the last sentences by the narrator was something like (translated from german): "Norbert Rosing still shoots slide film until today, he is not using digital techniques, so in a world of digital flux, his pictures are true and honest". Well... I don't know if this is the opinion of Norbert Rosing himself, too (maybe - in one of the scenes he was using a Leica R9 and a quite massive wideangle lens, with an extremely protruding front lens, much like Nikons 2.8/14-24mm).

And while I think I know how they meant it, the statement made me rather upset. I take the opposite position and dare to say that digital photography allows a much more genuine reproduction than film ever did. Why?

Think about raw data. When you store the raw sensor data, it is just luminance information. And thats it. There is no chemistry in form of film emulsion involved that reacts "somehow" to the incoming light. There is no color temperature and white balance, either. Its just the light. By the bayer pattern, and the de-mosaicing process, chrominance information is extracted from it. But that is already a post processing stage! The most genuine, true light information is in the raw sensor data, and before digital photography, there was no way to record it as pure like that.

I'm reading older books about photography at the moment (because I'm interested in the nature of photography itself, not the digital part of it - and not the analogue part, either). I just finished one book about long-time exposures and night photography, and currently I am reading one from the Audubon Society. Those books were written at a time where digital photography and manipulation did not exist (well, the book about long time exposures contains one rather hilarious example of an early photoshopped combination of three photos, quite funny).

And if there's one thing that is absolutely clear after reading these books it is this: shooting film was so flawed, I'm glad I'm using digital equipment. Now, that is a bold statement and I admit openly that I don't know all that much about film (last time I shot a roll of film in a compact camera was about 10 years ago), but from the books I read I learned something about the shortcomings of film:

Color. Film was made for a small range of color temperatures. The most common ones were of course daylight film, and film for artificial light. White balance? Neutral colors? Forget it, or counter it with colored filters. And no chance to correct a mistake one you released the shutter! Besides that, different film brands had different colors (some films had cooler colors, some had warmer colors, some had wild and vivid colors - Velvia 50 of course - etc. etc.). So, does film reproduce the true colors? I don't think so.

Next: Reciprocity, or more precisely, the low intensity reciprocity failure (LIRF - and in german, its called the "Schwarzschildeffekt" after its discoverer, Karl Schwarzschild). Basically, reciprocity means thats 2x5 equals 10 and 5x2 also equals 10 - or in photography terms: any given combination of aperture and exposure results in the same amount of light reaching the film or sensor (f/16 and 1/500s results in the same amount of light as f/11 and 1/1000s, or f/22 and 1/250s). But film doesn't respond linear, especially with longer exposures. The longer the exposure, the less sensitive film becomes. You've got to adjust your exposure times accordingly (something like "instead of 2 minutes, expose 3 minutes").

No problem so far... but color film consisted of different color layers, and some films had a different LIRF for the different color layers. The best know example is Vevia 50 again: the red layer stayed more sensitive in longer exposures, resulting in wild and blood red skies when photographers were shooting dusk or dawn. Again the question - true colors? I don't think so...

And (unlike you develop film yourself) then there's the lab. I tend to think about it as the analogue post processing stage. Its much like the automatic "enhancements" that are applied to your digital images nowadays if you order prints over the internet. They just do it, they fix colors, contrast and exposure, and most often, you can't do anything about it. And the same happens when you shoot film. Underexposure, lacking contrast, pushing your film (shooting it at a higher ISO than declared) - the photo lab would fix it for you. Control? True results? Nada.

Conclusion: film does not yield "true" or more authentic results. I'm not saying that digital photography doesn't have its shortcomings (instead of LIRF, we have to deal with hot pixels in long time exposures for examples, we don't allow ourselves artistic freedom on our quest for the holy, perfect white balance, ugly clipping highlights, etc. etc.)... but the idealized view that film is more "real" and "true" calls for objection. My personal take is that shooting film is like shooting JPEG - you limit the result on ONE possible interpretation, but still, an analogue negative is just one form of an interpretation of the incoming light (in photolytic reactions of silver halide crystals), while the digital negative (I mean the raw sensor data here) is, as I said above, pure luminance data.

The, sometimes and to some, questionable "added benefit" of digital photography lies in the post processing. It was not so easy to fake before the advent of digital photography, to "tune" your photos. Its complicated to draw the line - which post processing steps are OK, which are faking? I've been thinking about that for quite a while already, and I think I'll put my thoughts in another article - some day. :-)

Who's that girl?

Sometimes, the funniest moments happen right at home in front of your eyes... I went into our livingroom and my girlfriend was reading the magazine, just like this... I just had to sneak back into my room and get the camera. :-)

The question "who's that girl?" (and also "who's that guy?") pops up quite often for me - ever since one of my photos was shown in the "Explore" selection of PicasaWeb (I wrote about it here and here), new visitors come to my web album and leave friendly praise, funny comments, and also ask questions here and there. Thats wonderful - and completely beyond the amount of attention I ever hoped to receive. I can't keep up with my plan to follow the visitors back to their own albums, and I'm really sorry for that!

Another thing is the linkage to others albums. I have a lot of people in my favorites list and keep track of their activity and visit their albums, but I don't add them to my public link list. I hope nobody thinks that this is unfriendly, because what I really want to do is link to people whose photos are inspiring for me. There are some really awesome hobby photographers showing their albums in Picasa Web Albums.

I'm ambitious about my photography, I want to further develop my understanding of creating good photos (especially composition), and if there's someone out there who is like me, it won't help if I link to some personal web albums where people share the memories of their vacation just because I really like these people.

I hope that this doesn't sound arrogant (its not meant to!), but thoughts like these kept me occupied, and I wanted to get them out of my head. :-)

Stumbling with the new lens

Friday my new lens arrived - hooray! I mentioned in a previous post that I need more "tele", and I decided to get the 70-300mm VR Nikkor for that reason. Well, to be quite honest, after the first attempts I have to say that the difference between 200mm (which I already had with the 18-200VR) and 300mm is not that dramatical.

But there's another good thing about this lens: its not a DX lens - its image circle is large enough for a full frame (35mm) sensor (and film). On the APS-C sensor you get the sweet spot effect due to the smaller sensor size (and you get even more tele, of course - the 70-300mm's field of view is like that of a hefty 105-450mm telezoom on APS-C).

Today (well, Saturday, which is already yesterday as of typing this) I headed for the beautiful moor near Ibm in Austria to practice some real world usage with the new lens (instead of shooting the book shelf at home:-) together with the dog.


Small pine in the moor near Ibm in January • Fuji S5pro, AF-S VR Nikkor 70-300mm @ 300mm

To my own displeasure we soon scared off a nearby rabbit while the dog was on the leash, and since I was distracted (trying to get a good viewing angle on a group of birches) I let go the handle of the leash in the moment of surprise when the rabbit jumped off only 5 meters away and the dog started to go after it (hey... she's a dog... thats what dogs do). Its one of these "flexible" leashes that roll in and out of a small plastic housing.

So, I ran after the dog, trying to step on the handle - not so much because I wanted to catch the dog (she would come back anyway because she doesn't stand a chance against the rabbit) but because I feared that the leash might get entangled in some bushes somewhere in the middle of the moor.

The camera was strapped around my neck, and since the moor is frozen through at the moment I could actually keep pace with the dog... but then it happened... in slow motion... first I thought "oops, am I going to stumble or what?" the next thought was "damn, I AM going to stumble... and fall!"

Somewhere in mid air I grabbed the camera with my right hand and, landing elbows-first in the moor grass that somewhat mildered the effects of gravity, hit the flash shoe with my upper lip. OUCH. A nasty L-shaped bruise under my nose. It was bleeding, and it HURT. Darnit.

After I regained my breath and temper (I couldn't find very friendly names for the dog at that moment) I started searching the dog and then called my girlfriend for help. Together we found the dog - yes, of course the leash was entangled in some bushes... the little rascal was hopelessly trapped and yelped for help. Guess what, she was quite happy to see us. :-]

The sun was already gone by then, a slight fog crept across the meadows, and I needed to test the cameras function after my crash landing, of course... and I can celebrate shutter release number 3000 since I got the camera in summer.



Hope you enjoyed the story. :-P

Forest Sequence

Today (well, yesterday to be precise:-) was one of these "I don't know... I'll take the camera with me..." days when I went out into the cold january afternoon for a walk with the dog. I went to a small chapel in the forest in Austria, its built over a well known as "Heilbrünnl" (a dialect form of "healing well").

I go there very often with the dog - no cars, no noise, few people, its a beautiful walk... and I always think that its useless to take the camera with me, because I've been there so many times already with the camera. If I'd search my catalogue for the keyword "Heilbrünnl" I'd get hundreds of photos. :-)



And then... I don't know... am I beginning to see differently? Or do I see things that no one else can see? It occurred to me today that beauty is around us, all the time, and perhaps its a photographers "job" to kinda, well, it sounds harsh, but, "rip it out" of its hiding place in "context" and ambience so that others can see it. Or is it completely incomprehensible why I'm taking photos of trees? :-)



The third picture is an experiment - I saw the last rays of afternoon light on the trees, and the colors were simply terrific - but the tree shapes were not so terrific (at least in my opinion). Remembering the last time I faced a somewhat similar scene I tried to deliberately make an out-of-focus photo, but it didn't work - but panning did. I like the result:



And there's something I forgot to mention when I first wrote about panning: when you're experimenting with panning and/or out-of-focus photos its a good idea to configure the camera for "shutter priority" (instead of focus priority) - otherwise the camera won't let you take the photo maybe, because it recognizes that there's nothing in focus.

And depending on the camera this can be configured for single or continuous autofocus separately, or single AF means focus priority, and continuous AF means shutter priority. Separating the shutter and the AF comes in handy here, too (I'm using it all the time - the shutter only locks the exposure).

Hoarfrost

We have very little or no snow here at the moment. Instead, the cold weather (too cold to snow, actually, upto -17°C in the nights) creates lots and lots of partly really big hoarfrost crystals.


"Hoarfrost on blades, frozen lake"


"Big crystals on old reed"

I always thought I'd hate winter because of the snow and the mud, and now that there's no snow, I miss it! A walk in the bright white landscape, over crispy & cold fields, the snow crunching under the shoes (you know, the sound like chewing a carot:-)...

Color Management (and color stupid applications)

I just learned something new. After Jao's complaint that Picasa for the Mac is not color managed (and my response to it, because I was looking at it from a different perspective) we had a lenghty e-mail conversation in which he opened my eyes for something I was not aware of yet: a lot of applications that I use more or less frequently are totally NOT "color managed", as he put it.

What does that mean? Even if you calibrate your display hardware (which you really really should if you value your post processing) and end up with a corrected look-up-table (LUT) and a working color profile for your display set as standard in Windows (or Mac OS) by your calibration software, applications like Picasa, IrfanView and whatnot will simply ignore the working color profile - providing a "different type of random", as Jeffrey Friedl puts it in his excellent article about color management (beware, thats a 7 page article, but its really worth reading!). I was simply lucky and didn't notice that, because the default setting of my display and the calibrated version do not differ very much.

Well, and naive as I am (oh yes), I assumed that applications would use the standard color profile (your "working profile", specific to your display when you calibrated it) all the time - but thats not true. Even though Windows provides color management functions and supports profiles, a lot of applications simply ignore it (once more, I'm happy that I've made the right decision when I switched to Lightroom).

In the Mac world, it seems to be the rule that applications are "color managed" - in the Windows world, its the exception... imagine that: Internet Explorer for the Mac is color managed. But the Windows version? Nada. Neither is Chrome. The only browser that is somewhat capable of color management is Firefox 3. So - one of the things you should really do when you're using a Windows box with Firefox3 as your browser of choice is to enable color management (don't forget to restart Firefox).

Bird Sequence

Arrival


Gather


Departure

We watched this flock of swallows in late August 2008 as they landed on these wires, gathered & waited, and then all lifted off into the sky again for another round. It went on and on and repeated numerous times. I'm not interested in becoming a bird photographer now (except for the occasional duck that happens to be in a lake that I make a photo of:-), but watching large swarms of birds (or fishes, but its even more difficult to take a photo of them for me!) is always fascinating, isn't it?

Personal lesson: make a test shot in aperture priority mode, then switch to manual exposure to get consistent results.

PS: I won't keep up this blogging pace. Its just that I have a couple of days off thanks to a day off work here in Bavaria tomorrow. :-)

New Black & White album

"Stones in backlight"

I've decided to only announce new or updated theme albums here (my Picasa web albums are filled as time goes by and as photos arrive during my activities - the theme albums are my collected "personal best of" works - they're accessible from the "main" WWW page). I want to present these in a more stylish way (since my main home page sucks anyway:-) ...and I hope you enjoy it.

Regarding black & white... I've written about it before, but nevertheless... its not just clicking on that "greyscale" button. I try to weigh the different regions (should I dare say "zones" with reference to Ansel Adams' Zone System?) and carefully carve out their individual quality so that detail is left in all important areas. The above photo could be reduced to a much more graphical version, but that would mean drowning the shadows completely. I think its important to find a photos own quality in a black & white version, and its different from the colour version beyond the colour itself.

"Ebru" Wallpaper (Sun on water)

I received some nice and friendly feedback for the above photo in my web album. I was told by "Muttalip" and "MucahitOral" (apparently Picasa Web users from Turkey) that it looks like an old turkish art form called "Ebru", which is roughly described as painting marble-like struktures on paper (the link was supplied by MucahitOral).

I thought it would make a nice wallpaper, too, so here are a couple of pre-defined versions (right-click and select something like "Save Link as..." depending on your browser):

• 4:3 aspect ratio ("classic" 14", 15", 21") • 1024x768 (398kB) • 1400x1050 (524kB) • 1600x1200 (629kB)
• 5:4 aspect ratio ("classic" 17" and 19") • 1280x1024 (571kB)
• 16:10 aspect ratio (widescreen) • 1280x800 (488kB) • 1680x1050 (607kB) • 1920x1200 (732kB)

Honk if you like it or if a different aspect ratio is missing. :)

A raw dilemma (and why I keep shooting raw most of the time)

In the Nikon world, with my old D70s, I switched to shooting raw only after about 6 months (well, to be precise, the first three months I used a borrowed D70, then my own D70s and with my own camera I switched to raw after 2 months... in the end, thats 6 months after beginning with a DSLR). That was mid 2007.

In the meantime, I switched to the Fuji S5pro, and it has that unbelievable dynamic range (just check out dxomark.com , the S3pro and S5pro still share the lead in the dynamic range) and an excellent JPEG engine that really does an excellent job in taming that huge dynamic range into a single photo.

But nevertheless, the full advantage is only preserved by shooting raw. Here's a RAF, imported into Lightroom with the Adobe Standard camera preset, and cropped to 5:4 aspect ratio:

The sky looks hopelessly blown out, and in fact the highlight clipping warning of the camera (the only thing that I use since the histograms of the S5pro are simply crap, they're not just tiny but give no indication of clipped highlights) showed all of the upper region blinking.

I'm using the highlight clip warning all the time because thats the most important thing for me. I can always make a photo darker, but blown out highlights are dead white pixels (of course I can always make a photo brighter, too, but that means sacrificing signal-2-noise ratio and introducing more noise than necessary - I expose to the right).

Now, lets have a look at the image AFTER I edited in Lightroom (exposure compensation -1 globally, then a graduated filter with another -1.6 exposure compensation in the upper 2/3 - a total exposure compensation of more than 2 1/2 stops in the upper area!):


Yes... the only thing that is really blown out in the photo is the disc of the sun! Now, thats part of the Fuji dynamic range magic - but the real issue I want to show with this post is: there's no reliable preview for the quality of the raw data in ANY camera. EVERY camera shows you the JPEG on the display. Even if you don't shoot raw+JPEG but only store the raw data, the camera creates a JPEG and embeds it in the raw file as a preview. And its thats preview that you see on your camera's display. Its that JPEG preview that triggers the blinking highlight display. Its that JPEG preview that is used for the histograms.

This is a real problem because we can not reliably judge the raw data with the camera's display. However, there's something we can do: configure the JPEG engine of the camera to render the flattest JPEG thats possible. Only this way you'll have a highlight warning that is somewhat accurate.

In the Fuji world, this means: the camera must be set to 400% dynamic all the time, and the contrast (Fuji calls it "gradiation" in the menu) must be set to "ORG". In reality, using 400% dynamic is not such a good idea because at the very limit of the dynamic range, you'll get false colors (a magenta or cyan tint in the brightest areas). I'm using 300% so that the highlight warning triggers 1/2 stop earlier than the actual limit.

For other cameras (without extra dynamic range), the contrast must be set as flat as possible (in my D70s, that was -3 IIRC). This of course means that, if you were shooting raw+JPEG until now, you'll get JPEGs out of cam that look, erm... really really weak (which is a pity for me, because the JPEG engine of the Fuji is really excellent and I often shot raw+JPEG), but in return you'll have a highlight warning that tells you something that is closer to the "raw truth". :-)

Wald Horn Solo

"Wald Horn Solo" • Nikon D70s, 18-200VR lens @ 200mm f/7.1, 1/25s

I just stumbled across this funny picture of a boy training his horn playing skills (the funny thing is that he's standing close to the forest and what he plays is a so called "Waldhorn", which would directly translate to "forest horn", but the english name is only "Horn" so its just a bad pun that only works in german:-).

Nevertheless... the shot was taken summer 2007 after my tour across the Hörndlwand. It was almost 8pm and on my descend down into the beautiful and very quiet Röthelmoos the tunes the boy played where quite catching, with a soft reverb from the surrounding mountains and trees it gave that moment a "magic" touch.

Photography-wise, the shot has a "magic" touch, too - handheld at 200mm with an exposure time of 1/25s the VR (vibration reduction) really did an awesome job. Nikon claims to gain 3 stops with VR. Lets do the math: we consider the old formula of 1/focal-length for the shortest time to get a steady shot, and of course we do have to add the crop factor, too (yes, it applies everywhere...). So, without VR, our shortest "safe" time would be 1/320s (because 1/300s is not possible)... a gain of three stops would be 1/40s, and I was able to get a steady shot at 1/25s - so thats close to a 4 stop gain thanks to VR!

Impressive technology. I don't know if photography would be the same fun for me without stabilized lenses.

PS: I've replaced the normal blogger tag list with a nice and simple tag cloud - it uses less space on screen and its good looking (IMHO:-) - thanks Raymond!

Lightroom (ACR) and Fuji SR sensor raw data

It is still a quite common myth that Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw, ACR) does not support the Fuji raw data with its separate S- and R-Pixel photosite information propperly, and therefore only Fuji's own software (Finepix Studio and Hyper Utility, two achingly slow pieces of software which are, compared to Lightroom, rather clumsy to use, too, but thats just IMHO).

To bust that myth once and for all: its not true. ACR and Lightroom do support the special raw data from Fuji sensors. There's a statement by Thomas Knoll, ACR developer, in the adobe forums (its message #13, just scroll down in the thread), quote:

Internally, the S&R images are first merged into a single HDR image. The S pixels are used for lower part of the tone range, and the R pixel are used top of the range, with a smooth transition between the two. This merging is completely independent of all the camera raw controls. The exposure and recovery sliders adjust the white clipping point in this merged HDR image. The other tone controls adjust the rendering of the values between zero and the white clipping point.

Thats coincides with my own experiences. There's a TON of room for exposure corrections in Lightroom. I already compared the performance of Lightroom vs Finepix Studio in a previous post and there's no noticeable difference, really. Anyone who wants to use the S3pro/S5pro raw files with Lightroom and/or ACR can rest assured that its working just fine.

The only difference to the Fuji software (especially Hyper Utility) is that you can try all the camera settings of the JPEG engine on the PC afterwards, ie. the film simulations (my personal favorite for landscapes is F1b) or individual settings for dynamic range, color, sharpness etc.

PS: happy new year. :-)