The above animated GIF I made, shows an example of what sort of range one can get from a single raw file. It is an image that was included in the night shot gallery linked to in my previous X-E1 post. The dark version is how the default conversion settings look (my defaults, that is, ones that already give slightly more shadow detail than normal), when processing through Adobe Lightroom v4.3RC. The bright version is the final result. Most of the adjustments were just done with the highlight and shadow sliders, but in this case, I wanted to darken the bright interior down more without darkening the outside lit walls too much, so I did some selective adjustments for the windows. I was a bit sloppy and didn't isolate the main yellow door frame enough in the "after" version, so it has darkened down a bit too much for my liking. In any case, it serves to illustrate that one can get a remarkably good dynamic range from a single raw X-E1 file. Hopefully people don't find the continuously running animation above too annoying!
If you click the image (or the link below it), you'll be taken to a gallery with 24 image pairs, all taken from my previous X-E1 galleries, each pair starting with the "after" version and the image to the right is the "before", the original unadjusted version. It is effective to use the right and left keyboard arrow keys to switch between image pairs, so you can see a smooth fade from before to after and back, similar to the above animation but in higher resolution. Some images have fairly minimal adjustments but I thought it would be helpful for people to see how much manipulation has gone into the final versions, especially the night shots. On a few you'll see some slight tilting caused by perspective corrections where I either didn't quite get the shot perfectly lined-up, or where I intentionally tilted up or down for compositional reasons.
