Possible change to Sony A7 III: How is RAW processing?

[abibiano]

I’m an enthusiast photographer sine many years. 2 years ago, I changed from my Nikon full-frame camera (D610) to Fujifilm X-T2 with some good optics.

 

I really love the camera (it was a high improvement in reducing weight and space from my Nikon gear) and after spending several months adapting to the electronic viewfinder I began to love the mirrorless world, but I never reached the image quality that I got with my Nikon.

 

I was already a RAW shooter with Nikon and the workflow was very easy and fast: Lightroom with minor adjustment and it’s it. I do not like to retouch photos a lot and I seldom use Photoshop. I try to get the photo in the RAW and use Lightroom to crop, adjust white balance if needed, recover highlights, shadows, and add some basic sharpness and noise reduction.

 

Now with Fuji my workflow has changed a lot. After doing lot of tests, google the web, ask on forums, and trying different approaches (Lightroom, C1, Iridient, Photoshop …) I have found a workflow that works for me but it’s a lot more time consuming and the result is the same o worse than before with my Nikon (Iridient Transformer + Lightroom + Sharpening in Photoshop).

 

How is the RAW processing with Sony’s RAW files?

I usually do landscape, travel photography, macro and kid’s.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Alex B.

 

[DanArt]

Well for me what I do is

 

Raw conversion using the official RAW converter. They say it has changed dramatically between releases or so I have heard. However during this process I have found the converted raws to be no different then the actual file. However I have gotten different results with image viewers that is able to convert and read the file type.

 

Then I go to lightroom, photoshop or whatever image correction program. To finish the job. Lightroom is an automated workflow and is meant for more then one images but it does many things faster and cleaner as well. Usually is my first stop as it removes most of the speciles, or grain without even trying at all. Again that is done in conversion. I am using TIFF file type as the converted file usually as my primary file.

 

The RAW results gets better and better based off which program I use first. However is slightly pricey. If I could find an automated program like lightroom I would be glad.

 

The T2 I have heard bad things about the 4k video but I do not know if that is true??? in terms of low ISO.

 

This SONY Alpha A7RII as so far I have not really found any reviews that are regular people using the actual A7RIII. The A7RIII is slightly bigger, and uses a different battery type while the A7RII uses. There are tons of new features like USB 3.0 but I am still skeptical to buy the camera. Maybe a generation afterwards or as a second camera to my A7RII.

[Guest]

Coming from the a7r2, I´m using now the a7r3 and Lightroom Classic.

My usual workflow concerning development is that I always make an import preset for all my cameras.

Clarity, sharpening, masking, lens correction and my DNG camera profile will be set during import and will be altered if needed.

 

So mostly I only do some shadow and highlights and minor other adjustments.

But be aware, the file size (42mb for compressed raw) will stress your computer hardware.

 

I´m using Windows 10 on a i7, 32GB ram, a m.2 ssd and a gtx1070 graphic card. Still I wish lightroom would use more of my hardware for faster processing.

[Guest Jaf-Photo]

Sony's raw files is the reason I swapped from Canon several years ago. The latitude is great so you can take a photo in any direction you want. If you don't process a lot, it's quick and easy to make basic adjustments.

 

Fuji's raw files is what put me off their cameras. I find them to have very limited latitude and you can't do much better than the ooc jpegs. It depends on the x-trans sensor, where the raw conversion software is less developed. For that reason I think of Fuji as cameras for jpeg shooting.

 

The one thing you'll have to keep in mind with Sony is colour management. Sony colours can look a bit funny straight from raw conversion, so you'll have to learn to tweak them to your liking. It's not hard but it's a difference compared to other brands. (My fallback is to set black, white and grey point in PhotoShop.)

 

@DanArt --- LR and other programs have built in raw converters. This means you can access the full latitude of the raw file from within the program. If you first convert it to a tiff for further processing, you are really limiting your options from then onwards. A tiff is mainly for passing files between programs that don't read the same format, so there is no reason to use it as your starting file.

[DanArt]

Coming from the a7r2, I´m using now the a7r3 and Lightroom Classic.

 

I think it might depend on the version of lightroom you are using. Currently all Adobe applications should take full control over the 64-bit proccesing, which makes things move along faster. Some of these programs might still be 32-bit ( on purpose. )

[Guest Jaf-Photo]

All classic LR versions are slow, because they don't scale up with the CPU and the GPU. Adobe are only developing LR CC now, because of the bottlenecks in the classic version.

 

I think it might depend on the version of lightroom you are using. Currently all Adobe applications should take full control over the 64-bit proccesing, which makes things move along faster. Some of these programs might still be 32-bit ( on purpose. )

[Guest]

well I´m using the latest LR Classic CC on a 64bit machine. Having a look in the TASK MANAGER PERFORMANCE, you will learn that LR is NOT using all resources. ON1 RAW 2018 is using much more of the resources incl. the graphic chip.