X-series: RAW file processing in Lightroom

Ryan Williams wrote:

Without denying that Lightroom RAW conversion could be improved — because it could — I do think its issues are overblown by those who've spent very little time actually examining the files for themselves.

One of the things that's causing so much hysteria is that examples are being posted where a tiny fraction of the photo depicting something on the very fringe of what the camera's capable of resolving is shown at 100% and then people get in a panic about how bad it looks. What do you expect? All cameras have their limits in terms of what they can resolve, you can't just infinitely crop and expect usable images.

How the software treats these resolution limits also varies. Sometimes the barely-resolved detail will be sharpened so it looks somewhat 'watercolour', sometimes it's simply blurred. Which you prefer is down to preference but in neither case is there any significant difference to rendered detail. Lightroom is arguably too aggressive by default which certainly steers things more to the 'watercolor' side, but you can easily override its pre-sets.

There is a subtle loss of detail for sure, but in many if not most cases it's imperceptible unless doing extreme cropping.