A snapshot – with and without digital correction

I took this photo a few weeks ago and called it “Afterwork Cologne”. Just because I took it in the evening, on my way home after work, when I pass the Cologne Cathedral every day on the way from the train station to my home.

The camera used was the Fuji X-E3 with Fujinon 23/2 WR lens. It was set to record both a RAW and a JPG file. Without ever looking at that JPG, I opened RAW Therapee to load and edit the RAW file to my taste. I came up with the photo that you see below, to the left. The JPG out of cam (only scaled down to be uploaded here) is the one you see at the right.

Afterwork Cologne. (edited RAW file)

Afterwork Cologne. (JPG out of cam)

If you open any image with RAW Therapee, the default settings render it seriously very dull and low-contrast – you really have to change all those settings a lot to bring the image back to life! And with that process of fiddling and adjusting all settings, you’ll always add a big portion of your own taste to the edit. Thus, I actually was amazed when I later checked the JPG out of cam – as it looked really similar to the RAW in terms of color, contrast, saturation and such. This tells me that the Fuji out-of-cam JPGs have a really nice quality that apparently matches very well with my personal taste.

The “raw” RAW versus the “processed” JPG out of cam

Anyway, what you also see is the amount of in-camera lens corrections here! RAW Therapee does not read all the hidden information that Fuji adds to their images regarding vignetting, distortion, and what else to hide any imperfections of the lens used. Compare it with the JPG out of cam that includes all those automatic corrections. Distortion is not really a topic here as the 23/2’s optics are very well corrected for that. But vignetting is, as you can clearly see. The RAW Therapee file looks way darker at the four corners!

If you play that game with, say a Sony FE 28/2 or a Panasonic 20/1.7, or a lot of (often really expensive) modern zoom lenses, you’ll also be confronted with the almost insane amount of geometric distortion that those lenses deliver. (Read here about how you can even make good use of that distortion in some cases.)

Oh no! All those faults! What to do?

I think: if you use a quality (fixed) lens – don’t use all that digital correction stuff! Cause why would you really want to? I love that uncorrected file that RAW Therapee gives me!

All faster lenses vignette quite a lot at open aperture but then vignetting is not really an “ugly” fault. But why correct it? Often we all even add some vignetting in post, if the lens does not deliver it automatically …

Then we have more errors that are often addressed by those automatic corrections, like all kinds of color fringing, chromatic abberations. Some manufacturers even apply selective sharpening depending on lens profiles or apertures used. Especially with some zoom lenses, yes all that voodoo really is needed to make them shine!

But with a lens like the 23/2 used above, I’d say most faults are so small, so why would you bother to correct them? Only the vignetting correction really has a dramatic effect, as you can see!

Maybe it’s just me being silly, but I appreciate that I can get a good picture that is free of any digital corrections. It seems a small step to more “authentic” digital photography, where you just don’t change too much stuff in post but keep it in general very close to how the particular lens recorded it in the first place.

Which one of the two do you like more?

Cheers,
Thomas