Going A Bundle On Software - Japanese Camera Users Please Note.

I am being educated every night. Well, marriage and digital processing will do that to you - if you are inclined to bruise easily I should choose the latter rather than the former...

Each night this week I have pursued the question of computer software as it applies to RAW processing. I have a set of cameras from the Fujifilm company - their X-10, X-100. and X-E2 - and I want to deal with the raw files as well as the jpeg ones. Not that I need to do this all that often - Fujifilm jpegs are superb and many times I do not even need to go the RAW - certainly for the average 5 x 7 dance show shot the jpegs are unbeatable.

But there are times when the RAW is more detailed for studio shots. And here the rub is that the Adobe and Apple programs already in the computer will deal with the X-10 and X-100 but not the newer X-E2. For that I ventured timidly into the box and came out with the bundled software - Silkypix Developer Studio 3.

Woah. Dude. Who wrote this stuff? Ichikawa in Japan did, and initially I thought they had given the translation duty to the office cleaner...nothing on the open screen seemed to have sensible wording. There were "tastes" and"cloakrooms" and little icons that seemed to bear no relationship to anything I had ever seen. One looks like a pawn in a chess game sliding down a toboggan slope...

But with a bit of fingerpushen und eyeballsquinten and a set of duplicate jpeg and RAW files, it is starting to make a bit more sense. I used the online tutorial of some chap in Europe named Bela to figure out batch processing ( Hungarian lectures Canadian about Japanese software...) and I am ready to tackle an entire shoot with this feature. I have found the rather good chromatic aberration corrector and noted that it is also linked to a perspective corrector. If I can get these to link to the white balance and colour bias and then stamp out in a batch I shall dance a Hungarian/Japanese jig.

Those of you who laugh at this...and I DO hope you laugh...probably will point out that you can do a lot of this with PS or Aperture3 or Lightroom 5, and so you can. But you find yourself juggling and passing the file to get the combination of operations - I am hoping that I can get it all in one big bit. and that I can find a program that will open all the older RAW as well as all the new camera's RAW.

Finally, I appreciate the facility to have the program on two computers  at once and in my own possession - I do not fancy paying out $50 a month to have some cloud somewhere lose my images or share them with Langley - I can make enough errors right here in Perth.