Demonstration of X-Trans Under-the-hood RAW Spatial (Noise) Filtering

tradesmith45 wrote:

jm10 wrote:

kiwidad wrote:

jm10 wrote:

kiwidad wrote:

jm10 wrote:

tradesmith45 wrote:

jm10 wrote:

Thanks for posting this. Very interesting study. I can clearly see the importance of this for serious and dedicated astrophotographers. Looks like it may cause some to re-evaluate their equipment selection. Not sure about the implications for more casual "astrophotographers"...Too bad that the users have no control over the filtering.

jacob

Hope it helps some. I had a couple other reasons for posting this. I've seen hours processing my images thinking I was doing something wrong or that I'd gotten bad copies of lenses that was causing the muddy stars I got from the X-T2. But it was the filtering.

Makes me PO'd that Fuji hasn't owned up to this & that's the another reason for the post. Sony has acknowledged what they do.

Couple of things. First, do you think that this type of filtering has an effect on general photography (other than astrophotography) and secondly, could Fujifilm implement some sort of a "switch" if they wanted to?

In the original post it is mentioned this is only applied to exposures of 5 seconds or longer

Fair point but long exposures are used not only in astrophotography...

True but in your post you stated "other than astrophotography" and that is already answered by original post ( I may=je a bad assumption perhaps that general photography isn't long exposures...

I guess the definition of what "general photography" is is in the eyes of the beholder...:-) I would not argue this point...

, as far as 2 goes who knows.

Its interesting though since this whole thread seems to indicate Fuji do stuff to the raw data which may explain why the lesser cameras with Bayer seem to have sharper raw images straight out of the camera.

There seems to be lots of opinions on this subject. I don't have a X-T100 to offer any wisdom. Not a big fan of JPEG images out of a camera (you don't see a raw image - it is a file consisting of bunch of ones and zeroes...)

To perform a simple comparison of Bayer vs. X-Trans within an Adobe tool would not be fair. While X-T100 will perform well, an X-Trans camera may not and a tool with better demosaicking capabilities may be in order (like Capture One or PhotoNinja for example). Has been done before I think, but I have not payed enough attention since I was quite happy with the X-T2 performance.

Again, the opinion above would be applicable to so-called "general photography" - for astrophotography tradesmith45 presented convincing arguments that a Bayer sensor equipped camera may have an edge.

To be clear Jim, what I'm saying is NOT that the XT100 is better because it's Bayer but rather because its unfiltered. We don't know how an unfiltered X-trans would perform for long exposures because there aren't any.

I hope that we understand it the same way. X-T100 is using a Bayer CFA in a 2x2 pattern. X-Trans cameras are using an X-Trans CFA in a more randomized 6x6 patter. Both versions are not using additional Low-Pass (hardware) filters on top of the arrays. What tradesmith45 discovered is that X-T100 is not using extra filtering in software but some (or all) X-Trans cameras do (after 5 seconds of exposure).

Also the difference shows regardless of what software is used for RAW conversion.

Yes, at least for astrophotography applications. We are on the same page here...