How do you deal with X3F files ?

MGinitials wrote:

allineedislight wrote:

I use SPP. It is the best program to develop X3F raw files.

Thanks for your reply. Can you elaborate on this statement, as I find SPP not very user-friendly at all... ?

Sure. I didn't say it is the most user friendly program, and I also did't say it is the best editing program. But it is the best way to develop X3F raw files.

Sigma knows best how to process the raw information in X3F files, and they have not made this information publicly available. Thus, open source software like Kalpanika does not have all the information to optimally process X3F files. I wish X3F was an open data format but it is not.

So things like changing white balance, adjusting exposure and fill light should really be done in SPP. Once that is done just save as TIFF (or even JPG with the least amount of compression) and edit further elsewhere. But the basic processing steps (white balance, exposure, raising shadows and controlling highlights) should be done in SPP for optimal results.

If you are happy with suboptimal results, just shoot JPG and that's fine too! I did this with other cameras (Fuji) but I would say with Sigma cameras you really loose out when you don't use the raw files - and SPP.

Finally, about DNG files: later cameras (Quattro) have the option to save directly in DNG format in camera. However, even for those models it seems that X3F is still the preferred format of many users because the DNGs don't seem to have all the information that is available in the X3F files.