Iridient Developer 2.1.1 (with X-Trans support)

Iridient Developer is a powerful RAW image conversion application designed and optimized specifically for Mac OS X. On June 25th Iridient Digital introduced version 2.1.1. This release caught attention of many Fui X-Trans users because: “X-Pro1, X-E1, X20 and X100S now natively supported by new demosaic process in addition to existing support using Apple RAW libraries”

Almost immediately several bloggers compared Iridient to ACR 8.1 and posted their raving reviews on the net. Great, but we all know that ACR does less than a stellar demosaicing of x-trans raw files.

So I decided to compare Iriridient Developer 2.1.1 to Aperture 3.4.5 and Capture One Express 7.1.3, because, in my opinion, they both are excellent tools and handle RAF files way better than ACR 8.1.

Iridient interface is well thought, logical and easy to use. There are plenty of options and controls but what would be the best method/settings combination?
Brian Griffith (Iridient Developer author) was very helpful and gave some good tips on how to get the best out of his product.
You can choose between three (!) demosaic methods: Apple RAW, Adobe DNG 8.1 or Brian's own

Brian’s favorite setting:
Sharpening Method: DoG. Noise Radius: 0.24, Sharpening Radius: 0.60 Amount 140
Noise reduction v2 Auto Levels 6,4,5,2

I really like Brian's demosaic and used his settings for my comparison exercise

The Iridient output file is clean, crisp with very pleasant colour palette (less saturated than Aperture and C1). Iridient pulls more details than both Aperture and C1 and doesn't have colour artifacts like Aperture. But ... with only few adjustments in Aperture and C1 all three tiffs can look very much alike.

Bottom line: Iridient Developer 2.1.1 is an excellent raw converter, may be the best for x-trans files. There is no doubt in my mind that it can extract the most details out of the Fuji X-Trans RAW files.

I can recommend this excellent product to anyone, but especially to someone who already has Lightroom but not fully satisfied with ACR output. Now you can combine all the strengths of LR (asset management, highlight/shadows recovery, etc) with excellent and powerful raw file converter.

It may be less relevant for current Aperture and Capture One users because with those tools you can easily get similar close to Iridient results, but you have to make your own decision. The Demo version is available at the Iridient Digital site.


Thanks,
vkphoto