It’s Iridient Developer’s 10 year anniversary, and Brian decided to start a sale that runs through the end of the year! The price for the probably best X-Trans RAW conversion software is right now discounted to $69.95 (30% off). Get it here at iridientdigital.
Also Soundimageplus highly recommends Iridient to every X-shooter. Read why here. Download Iridient 3.0 beta 4 for Mac here.
“I absolutely love what IR does to all my files and particularly my Fuji X images which have frustrated me over the years. My lenses look sharper, my sensors look better and over the past day I’ve processed hundreds of images using IR and have been consistently impressed with what I can achieve.”
17 Responses
This version of Iridient produces better details than Lightroom AND Fuji’s own JPEGs (which still suffer from a watercolor effect on repeating patterns such as brick). But for everything else it’s not up to Lightroom standards and often the color is off.
The examples posted on Soundimageplus don’t do much for selling the color and tonality of Iridient, but if you look at this image from a Lightroom forum below you can see it’s clearly superior in sharpening and detail.
Plenty of examples showing that here: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/fuji_x_trans_support
I find the best solution is to process the image neutrally in Iridient and then do colour work in Lightroom. Plus you get Lightroom’s cataloging features then.
So basic RAW development, then … then output the file as a TIFF and take it into Lightroom (or I guess Photoshop, if one prefers) for final work?
Yes that’s right, you can get it to open the resulting tiff in Lightroom (or any other program) when you process it as well.
Wow, the trouble people go to! I just love the out-of-camera JPEGs! 😉
Fuji JPEGs are outstanding, no question. But sometimes the light gets dodgey and you need to go into the RAW file to extract more latitude … or sometimes you just need to wring every last bit of quality out of an image for some reason, and RAW is the way to do it.
Best solution is to shoot RAW + JPEG. The if the latter isn’t quite good enough, you can go into the former and work it yourself.
Color style is very much a personal preference and I provide a wide variety of looks specially for the Fuji X-Trans cameras that should mimic most all of the in-camera film styles fairly well (minus the latest chrome style). If you like a more Lightroom style look try the “DNG Matrix Color Default” in the Input Profile menu which should give a default color style more like Adobe’s.
More Fuji film style presets can be downloaded here:
http://iridientdigital.com/downloads/Iridient_FujiX_Presets3.zip
And I also provide more presets to make it easy to use ICC color profiles produced by a photographer on the dpreview forums who has made his own attempts to mimic the Fuji film style looks, these can be downloaded here:
http://iridientdigital.com/downloads/Iridient_FujiX_4C1Profs.zip
Iridient Developer also has an incredibly flexible color management setup and supports camera profiles in both ICC and DNG DCP formats which makes it compatible with just about any camera profiling solution ever produced from commercial tools like X-Rite Passport or ProfileMaker to small independent open source tools like ArgyllCMS as well!
Brian Griffith
Iridient Digital
Brian – how does Iridient run on older Macs? For example, 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo running 10.6.8?
Should run reasonably well on old systems though some of the newest v3 stuff is getting more processor intensive. Can choose to use the faster v2 processing if speed is really a critical issue.
Memory can be a BIG issue on some old systems, especially if you like to run multiple image apps all at once. If you have 4GB or less I’d avoid running other memory hungry apps while RAW processing in Iridient. If you do exhaust physical memory performance will degrade radically.
A few of the v3 features (Vibrance, Neighborhood Adaptive Highlights/Shadows) require 10.7 or later. 10.6 is showing its age and 3.0 may be the last release to work on 10.6.
Brian Griffith
Iridient Digital
Good info. Thank you, Brian for the quick feedback! Perhaps better to run v2, then.
I you’re just interested in the fastest speed possible v2 would be fine… but I think the new RAW processing methods in version 3, especially for Fuji X-Trans and AA-less Bayer cameras, are well worth the slight bump up in processing time.
I’d try them both, my guess is once you’ve seen the v3 processing you’re not going to mind the extra wait 🙂
Plus feedback on the new v3 “Reveal” sharpening and new Clarity adjustments have been getting extremely positive feedback from users and neither of these features are available with v2.
Brian Griffith
Iridient Digital
Sounds like v3 is definitely worth the extra time required, for sure.
I’ve also got a 2011 MacBook Air with a Core i5 1.7 running 4 gigs of RAM, so I might be better off using it to do basic processing (I can always save those out as tiffs and finish them in CS5 on either machine). Does the single Iridient download allow for installation on two computers, or does one have to pay twice?
The license permits use by a single person on as many computers as you like. There is no number or type of computer limit. If multiple people are using the software on multiple computers then you need to purchase a license for each person.
Purchase also includes 18 months of free updates regardless of version designation and the license is “perpetual”. There is never a requirement to upgrade or buy a new license to keep using the software.
Brian Griffith
Iridient Digital
Processing RAFs is a bit on the slow side on a 2GHz Core i7 (Mac Mini 2011) (maybe 5 seconds to open an image and about half a second to adjust to a slider change) so it will probably take awhile on a Core Duo.
Store is off line
PC version, please!…
Wouldn’t think such a great tool to be developed by a 10 year old.
Oh wait .. just kidding. 😛