X-PRO 1 - X-E1 - X-E2, Genuine advice

bowportes wrote:

Threaded wrote:

uniball wrote:

Strangefinder wrote:

There may be a love-hate quality to the X-Trans II platform (which added phase-detect). Many people joined Fuji via the X-T1, and praise it, while others were dismayed by the "waxy" skintones at higher ISO.

Fortunately, most people who purchased xt1's didn’t/don’t shoot jpeg and never came across waxy skin tones. For many than did, a brief visit to the menu>NR took care of it. But you are correct, there is always that group who purchased the wrong camera, for the wrong reason and never learned how to use it.

For years people have been parroting this and it’s still wrong - no, a visit to NR in the menu did not fix it. Nothing fixed it. It was a deliberate beautifying process baked into the jpeg processing by Fuji and it was not affected by the standard noise reduction setting. Fuji screwed it up, luckily they rectified their mistake in X-Trans III and later. There’s no need to keep on making excuses for it now, it’s history.

Actually, there was a workaround for avoiding "waxy skin" at 6400 iso:

1. Shoot at 1600 iso with minimal NR and underexpose by 2 stops (by using the EC dial).

2. Reprocess the raw in-camera, boosting exposure by two stops.

Result? 6400 iso jpeg with no waxy skin. It was an awkward workaround, but it worked.

Oh I know, and I used that workaround from time to time myself back in the day, but tbh it just made me more angry since it was proof positive that the cameras were perfectly capable of taking decent pictures with realistic skin tones at those ISOs, it was just the crazy software getting in the way.

The biggest problem with that workaround was that on those X-Trans 2 bodies there was no way to have the EVF not preview the exposure so shooting at -2EV in low light inevitably meant you could barely see to frame in the viewfinder.. really not a practical solution all told.