Lightning over White Sands, New Mexico
I am back from a three week road-trip to the Southwestern US. This time, it was a trip through Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and back, for a total of 8,945 km of driving. The furthest south was White Sands, New Mexico, where the above photo was taken at dusk. Actually, the shot is looking towards White Sands from Oliver Lee State Park to the east.
Not only is this blog posting about sharing a few trip images, prior to getting some full galleries posted, but also to discuss X-Trans sensor raw conversions, specifically how the latest Adobe Lightroom CC compares to PhotoNinja with images from my Fujifilm X-Pro2. While Adobe has significantly improved their Fujifilm X-Trans raw processing, eliminating many of the original obvious drawbacks, such as badly smeared colour details, strange blurs and/or outlining along high colour-contrast edges and so on, there are still some weaknesses. One is that fine texture details with strong colour contrast still seem to lack definition (nowhere near as badly smeared as before though) and that detail in shadows, and not just ones that have been dramatically pulled up in post, often seems to look muddy and rather blurry. By the way, you can click on any of the shots in this posting to bring up a much larger version. Just click the back button in browser to return to the post after...
Also, if you just want to see images from the trip and don't care about raw processing, click to see all the blog postings from my 2016 June Southwest Trip...
